North of Naples, South of Rome

by Tullio, Paulo;

  For some of those who remained, the returning emigrant has been a lucrative source of income. ‘A chicken ripe for plucking’ is a phrase often used to describe the emigrants, and plucked of their feathers many of them have been – a few emigrating a second time, perhaps to rebuild their fortunes. They pay too much for the land they buy, too much to the builders of their houses, too much to builders’ suppliers and often not enough to people in public office who could help them through the tangled web of regulation and red tape that is Italian bureaucracy.

  This particular minefield, the Italian bureaucracy, can be an impenetrable labyrinth to the uninitiated. It has driven a couple I met, recently returned from Scotland, right back to the safe, honest, Presbyterian haven of Aberdeen. The closest a casual visitor or tourist is likely to come to this bureaucracy is in an Italian bank. To change bank notes – in any other country an operation of blinding simplicity – involves a minimum of two queues, and probably the need to produce a passport and forms signed in triplicate. Any Italian bank will be full of men in shirt-sleeves behind the counter, all purposefully shuffling papers and moving from desk to desk, completely ignoring the customers. Tellers shut their doors for no apparent reason and disappear. Anything more complicated than changing money can take hours, or in some cases days. Queues in banks, by the way, are exactly the same as most Italian queues – that is, the order of precedence is not often first come, first served. Favoured customers are taken in behind the counter to do their business while lesser mortals wait at unmanned tellers’ windows. Town halls and post offices are identical in their view of customer service.

  In the 1970s my parents opened an antique shop in Sora, specializing in English furniture. Having rented the ground floor of a new building, they needed only a fire certificate to open. My mother asked her friends how to proceed. ‘Easy,’ they said. ‘Go to Frosinone Head Office, and give the fire chief a million lire [about £500], and he’ll give you the certificate.’ My mother, who had spent many years in England and admired the English way of doing things, was horrified. The idea of paying a bribe to get something that was hers by right appalled her. She refused, and waited six months in vain for a certificate allowing the shop to open. Eventually she did as her friends suggested, paid the chief and got the certificate, having lost six months’ trade.

  2

  Wine and the Baby Jesus

  August is busy in Gallinaro, it’s the month when all the emigrants return, and it’s the month of the festa of San Gerardo, patron saint of the village. Small villages like mine rarely have much claim to fame, but the English pilgrim, Gerard, who became its patron saint, left a legacy of at least regional fame for his adopted village.

  Conversion to Christianity began in earnest in the British Isles in the early seventh century. Pope Gregory the Great had sent Saint Augustine to begin the task. At the same time, in 628, Cyrus, King of the Persians, was compelled by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius to return the True Cross, which he, Cyrus, had stolen in 627 when he had sacked Jerusalem. Heraclius let it be known throughout Christendom that the cross would be returned to Jerusalem the following year, 629. From all over the Christian world pilgrims set out to arrive in Jerusalem by that date, among them four English converts, whose names have come to us as Gerard, Bernard, Arduine and Folco. They were in Jerusalem when Heraclius himself reinstalled the True Cross in the Basilica of Jerusalem.

  After a short stay in the Holy Land, the four set off for home in 630, travelling through Italy from Bari to Monte Gargano, where the Archangel Michael had appeared to Pope Gelasius I. There they spent nine years fasting, praying and teaching. Eventually resuming their journey to Rome, they stopped for a while in the Comino Valley, where all four fell prey to fever. Gerard, now fifty-two years old, succumbed and died in Gallinaro in April 639. His three companions moved on towards Rome, but Bernard died after a little way in Rocca d’Arce, Folco in Santo Padre, and Arduine in Ceprano – they are all now patron saint of the town in which they died.

  In 655 a dying traveller spent the night in Gallinaro beside St Gerard’s tomb. He had a vision of the saint, who told him that the people of Gallinaro were poor and ungrateful. On awakening he found himself in full health. The miracles had begun. Local legend has it that many of Gerard’s family were present for his canonization and took the name Gerard henceforth as their surname. In 1355 a knight called Dominic de Gerardis arrived in Gallinaro to pay homage to Saint Gerard. In 1376 two knights, Peter and Andrew de Gerardis, also came to Gallinaro. Sir Peter, a priest, gave money and land to the parish, while Sir Andrew founded a public hospital for the poor, which, although long gone, is remembered in the name of the road to Ponte Melfa, still called Via Ospedale.

  Perhaps the most illustrious of the Gerard family arrived in 1608. John Gerard of the Society of Jesus, founder of the English College in Douai, one of the only men ever to escape from the Tower of London, came to honour his ancestor. He brought a gift of a silver monstrance, made in the shape of an arm and inscribed ‘Anglicana Gerardorum familia suasu, atque opera Patris Johannes de Gerardi e societate Jesu dono mittit anno salutis MDCVIII’, roughly translated as ‘Through the aegis of Father John Gerard SJ the English family of Gerard sends this gift, this year of grace 1608’. This monstrance still leads the processions that are held in honour of the saint.

  My old friend Domenico Celestino disputes many of the legends concerning our patron saint.

  ‘Fifteenth-century fantasy,’ he said. ‘Gerardo couldn’t have come here in the seventh century, Gallinaro didn’t exist till the tenth. The hagiographers liked to drag as many mystical and magical elements as they could into the lives of the saints, hence all that guff about the True Cross and the Emperor Heraclius. All made up to titillate and enthral the faithful – those hagiographies were the fifteenth-century equivalent of romantic thrillers.’

  I reminded him that he had subtitled his book on the history of Gallinaro ‘Twenty Centuries on a Hill’. By my reckoning that put the founding of Gallinaro at around the year dot.

  He was not to be dissuaded. He had found in the episcopal records in Sora documents relating to the canonization of our saint. According to these, Gerardo died in Gallinaro in 1102, and was canonized by Bishop Roffredo of Sora in 1127. These documents run counter to the oral tradition which has always maintained that he was English; the Sora records on three occasions say he was from Alvernia in France. It is possible that he may have been of Norman descent and origin, and, although French, he may have come from Norman-occupied England. This, coupled with the well-documented evidence of the fourteenth-century visit of the two English knights, and the seventeenth-century visit of John Gerard, probably makes this version essentially correct.

  Since the miracle of the traveller, pilgrims have come from all over the region to the Sanctuary of San Gerardo. The town of Scanno, high up in the Abruzzi mountains, still sends the largest group, normally around one hundred, who come on his feast day to reclaim the saint that they feel is rightfully theirs. It was in Scanno that the saint had spent his nine years of missionary work; his only connection with Gallinaro was that its unwholesome air had caused his death.

  Nowadays the new road through Forca d’Acero means the Scannese can come by bus, but I can remember seeing their torchlit procession coming down the mountains, a journey which took two days on foot. Today they walk only from the bottom of the hill up to the town, some 3 kilometres. It is still an event steeped in ritual. The Scannese arrive in their traditional costumes, the women with beautifully embroidered dresses and head-scarves, the men in black capes. All of them carry a staff for the procession and sing as they walk. Men and women alternate verses in a hymn of praise to San Gerardo. They spend the night in the church, ready for the festa the next morning.

  Despite this continuing devotion, it has been many years since the good saint has performed a miracle. Why there should be this lapse after so many years of performing, I don’t know. However, miracles have not stopped in Gallinaro. While San Ge
rardo has been on the wane, another site of miracles has been established in a woodland clearing in the valley just below my house.

  Some twenty years ago a Gallinaro woman was working her land when she had a vision of the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus in her arms. She was inspired to build a small chapel on the site of her vision, nestled between olive trees, with a backdrop of Gallinaro spread out along the ridge and the high Apennines behind. This tiny chapel, known as the ‘Bambin’ Gesù di Gallinaro’ or the ‘Baby Jesus of Gallinaro’, surrounded by wood violets and anemones, now attracts pilgrims on a daily basis. In the last few years it has mushroomed into a phenomenon that is impossible to ignore. On Sundays in summer an average of 150 coaches and 400 to 500 cars arrive, turning this tiny village into a sort of embryonic Lourdes.

  So large is this influx that the town council has had to make changes to accommodate it. The official market day was changed from Friday to Sunday, so that now townspeople can legally sell their produce to the pilgrims who have to walk the last 2 kilometres to the chapel, passing an increasingly large assortment of restaurants, bars and stalls. Large placards on the roadsides modestly inform the visitors that they are entering the confines of the New Jerusalem. The feeling is mixed in the town as to the merits of having miracles; some five families benefit from the trade that so many people bring, but the rest of us have to put up with the rubbish and the choked access roads.

  To accommodate so many coaches in this mountain village, another road had to be built, almost parallel to the old, making each one-way only. Where once the view from our terrazza was of unspoilt valley, now the new road passes directly behind the garden wall, giving us a view of the coaches’ roofs as they pass. And it seems that the development won’t stop there. The small valley we look out upon will almost certainly have yet another new road cut through it from the west, allowing direct access to the Chapel of the Baby Jesus from Sora and Rome, by-passing Gallinaro completely. There is even a scheme to build a large pilgrims’ complex in this same valley to accommodate pilgrims who want to spend more than a day at the shrine. Recently I have begun to notice road signs as much as 50 kilometres away pointing the way to the chapel.

  Italy, like most countries in Europe, is becoming increasingly secular. The phenomenon of the Baby Jesus of Gallinaro is probably the last gasp of an old order. The pilgrims who flock to the shrine are mostly old, and the majority are from the south of Italy. The letters on Italian number-plates denote the province in which the car owner is resident, and a cursory glance shows almost none of the cars come from north of Rome. It may be a gross generalization, but the industrial north is less inclined to believe in miracles than the agricultural south, and the young are similarly inclined to disbelief.

  A typical example of what sort of miracle to expect took place in July 1993. Nearly a thousand pilgrims witnessed the sun split in two. One half continued its normal course, the other went backwards. Curiously, although this event was reported in the regional press, the phenomenon was not visible from my terrace, where the sun kept to its usual itinerary. As far as I know, no observatory in the world noticed this odd happening either.

  Creeping secularization has also had an effect on the festa of San Gerardo, as the religious aspects of the festival have increasingly been overshadowed by fun. People from other villages have long come, not for the mass and the processions, but for the dancing, the band and the fair that makes up the rest of the three-day festa. In 1991 the town council decided to append a five-day secular festival to the three-day ‘religious’ one. It was called the ‘Festa per quelli che tornano’. ‘Those who return’ refers to the town’s emigrants scattered around the globe.

  The valley has seen times of abundance and times of poverty. When in 1944 General Kesselring was driven from the valley by the Allies, a new era dawned. Within five years economic desperation forced nearly half of the inhabitants to leave. The town of Casalattico now has a population of just over 600; over 2,000 of its inhabitants are in Dublin. The migration of the landless had its effects upon the landed as well – since no one was left to work on the farms, many of the farmers gave up the struggle and emigrated as well. Every member of my family, except for two spinster aunts, left, leaving the farm for ever, after 600 years of occupancy.

  For eleven months of the year Gallinaro has a population of around 600; in August when the emigrants return it becomes thousands. They have for years been a mainstay of the local economy, not just because of what they spend in the month of August, but also because of money they have sent to dependent relatives over the years and the money they spend rebuilding their family houses, or constructing new ones. A festival to encourage their continuing return is clearly a worthwhile investment.

  It began uncontroversially enough on 4 August with a painting competition: the contestants were required to paint any aspect of the town within the time limit of eight in the morning to five in the evening. Throughout the day artists, including my wife, worked all around the town, their picnic lunch supplied and delivered in situ courtesy of the town council. During the afternoon the heats of the ping-pong competition took place noisily in the piazza. By six o’clock the paintings were framed and hung, some twenty of them, on the wall of the old palazzo that flanks one side of the piazza. While we were viewing the exhibition Alberto, the mayor, approached me.

  ‘Are you still in the wine business?’ he asked.

  I told him I was.

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘I need you on the tasting panel for the wine competition.’

  Now this represented something of a poisoned chalice in more ways than one. Gallinaro wine-makers pride themselves on their cabernet sauvignon, each producer fiercely proud of his own wine and positively disdainful of anyone else’s. I can count about twenty producers between friends and relations, so here was an opportunity to offend virtually everyone I know. However he insisted, and I accepted.

  One of my oldest friends in Gallinaro is Nicola Celestino. He offered to show me to the new town hall where the tasting was to take place. We were at the door when he said to me: ‘You’ll know my wine, it’s a white, but with a hint of rosé; I’ll say no more.’

  Every year Nicola has given me a 25-litre demijohn of his wine; now was clearly the moment for the favour to be repaid.

  Inside the town hall I found a large table with nine panel members already seated around it, but no wine as yet in sight. The jury was made up of two wine merchants from nearby towns, the president of the wine co-operative Cesanese del Piglio, his son and the export manager, an emigrant to France back for the holidays, a small, neat man who looked exactly like Suchet’s Poirot, two wine lovers from adjacent towns, and me. The mayor arrived, introduced us to each other and explained how the tasting was to work. The producers had entered two bottles of each wine presented, one with their name and address inside a closed envelope sealed to the bottle with wax, the other with only a number. We were to see only the numbered bottles. In this way no one could know whose wine was being tasted and the integrity of the competition would be assured.

  It was now half past six. The mayor explained that there were eighty-seven wines to be tasted, and that the presentation was due to be made on the stage in the piazza at nine o’clock. It would be a rushed job, but if we started now, it might just be possible. One of the wine merchants suggested that we should have a chairman and so a long discussion took place to decide who that might be. Eventually it was decided that the small, neat man, the owner of a fine walled vineyard in Sant’ Elia Fiume Rapido where he produces and bottles an excellent merlot, should have the honour. Another ten minutes was then lost while glasses, paper for notes, pens and a bottle opener were sought and found. Ten to seven, and nineteen white wines were placed on the table.

  We decided that in order not to influence each other unduly we would score all nineteen wines and only then read out our marks for each, which would be totalled and divided by ten. About half-way through the bottles a rosé was poured. Nicola’s wine. It was
delicious and I marked it high. By eight o’clock we were reading out our marks for the whites. Nicola won hands down. This was becoming embarrassing.

  Our chairman suggested we should taste the top five wines again, since these were to be presented with diplomas of excellence, just in case we wanted to revise our original judgements. Nicola was still winning. Our chairman tried another tack. ‘This winning wine,’ he said, ‘is more a rosé than a white. Perhaps it should have first prize as a rosé.’

  There was some agreement with this, when Diodato, one of the wine merchants (with whom Nicola shares a house), remarked that it could look as though it had won by virtue of being the only rosé, not because it had had higher marks than any of the whites. A compromise was reached: it would win first prize as rosé and our chairman would take pains to point out at the prize-giving that it was first on merit, rather than because it was the only contestant in the category.

  It was ten past eight, I had had no supper and there were sixty-eight red wines still to taste. The mayor arrived with news of the painting competition. The jury had nearly come to blows over who was to receive the first prize. It seems that my friend Nicola had phoned the mayor the previous week and had suggested an art teacher that he knew as a possible member of the jury. The mayor had accepted his recommendation and put the teacher on the jury. Now it transpired that one of the contestants, a pretty girl from Poland and a cousin of Nicola’s latest girlfriend, happened to be the object of this art teacher’s affections. He had helped with her composition throughout the day and was holding out for her to win first prize. The other members of the jury didn’t want to even place her work, but eventually they arrived at the compromise of adding a sixth prize and awarding it to her. My wife, the mayor told me, had won third prize, and would have won first prize if she hadn’t entered a water-colour. Still, third prize was 300,000 lire, in cash.