Ciao Calabria

When Cholo launched his plans to visit Calabria in the spring he intended it to be a long visit, much to the concern of my wife and her sister.  When we made our flight arrangements I carved out 10 days, the most I felt comfortable with while Cholo insisted on staying for a month.  I understood his reasoning.  If you're going to move yourself all that way why not make the most of it and stay for as long as possible?  It's not like a long voyage was new to him.  3 or 4 years ago he did a month in the Phillipines with my MIL and in the distant past had spent similar amounts of time abroad in Argentina and Brazil.  But on those trips he always stayed with family.  In this case he figured on the hospitality of unknown and unmet relatives.  The reality of executing that plan was something Cholo didn't anticipate. His family contacts in Italy were weak and we never stumbled upon that long-lost cousin to welcome him in to their home.  Whats more, the nearly dollar and a half cost of a euro meant finding a place on your own was sure to be expensive.

When we awoke Monday my plan was to get going early so I could set myself up in Rome for the following day's departure.  I was hoping to arrive in Rome early enough to see the Palatino and Emperor Nero's home, the Domus Aurea.  I had set up a night back at our original hotel weeks ago so I could have a jumping off point for my AM departure on the 9th.  Cholo has assured his girls any myself that he'd manage to find someplace to crash and I fully expected he would.  He's resourceful and seemed unconcerned so I trusted his confidence. 


Bar Ercole
Pizzo is a small town and not quite the most plugged in place on earth.  Somehow on our first afternoon there I discovered a weak wireless signal in the main piazza.  Walking around, staring at the bars on my phone I found the signal was emanating from one of the many coffee/bar/gelato joints on the square, the Bar Ercole.  One of the guys inside the joint saw me fumbling with my phone and drug me inside tapping the WAP password in to my device and later, Cholo's laptop.  We were in!  The staff got to know us well after a few days and there was even an ex-pat American, from Santa Barbara, happy to speak in English for a change.  But for Bar Ercole we would have been in a data vacuum since my attempts to get my phone on the Italian phone & data network failed.  We would go there every morning for coffee (yes, amazing) and pastry and every night for tartuffo and maybe a shot of grappa.  This let us stay in touch with home and loved ones via skype, plus let me look up stuff on the net and fire off blog entries and photos.  Internet whore that I am, it proved indispensible, especially this Monday morning.  

Things change
Now I had been encouraging (nagging?) Cholo for some time to find himself a place to stay for when our paths would separate but like I said he never seemed concerned.  I just assumed he knew what he was doing.  The way each of approached this showed where we are different.  Before traveling I like to plan and plan and plan.  Long before our departure I had researched a dozen and a half cities and who knows how many B&Bs and shitty hotels.  We had no reservations before we arrived in Calabria (unheard of for me) so for my piece of mind I wanted to have options.  Lots and lots of options.  For whatever reason Cholo had the same confidence despite making no arrangements whatsoever.  His plan was to ask the owner of the B&B with whom we'd been staying for the past 4 days to cut her price in half after I left.  He figured she had no ther clients so she'd take what she could get.  This plan was hatched Thursday but not executed until Monday morning. 


She declined and suddenly Cholo seemed out of ideas.  He asked me to look for some other options on the computer.  I already had a few in hand and added a couple more with a web search while we sipped cappucino on the piazza.  I spent the next few hours trotting Cholo around to 4 other B&Bs in Pizzo that had vacancies.  Places with stairs were disqualified immediately.  I found him a place at ground level overlooking the Gulf of Eufemia but he rejected it upon inspection, complaining about the lack of a private bath and the elderly, smelly proprietor.  Suddenly he was very picky.  2 Other sites in Pizzo proved unsuitable and the 3 others I found in nearby Vibo Valentia Marina and Briatico where there weren't quite so many hills didn't make the grade either.  The morning had evaporated while I searched for a bed, my plans for sightseeing scuttled.  I still had hope to make Rome by dinnertime when in an abrupt an unexpected change of plans Cholo decided he would cut the trip short and try to get on my flight back home the following night. 

Piazza Nationale at night, Pizzo.

I don't know why I was shocked.  Coming home with me made perfect sense and had for months prior.  Why he came to his conclusion late this morning I have no specific idea, but plenty of guesses.  Maybe the reality of being alone and without a car and my assistence had sunk in.  Or he was worried about the cost and/or less comfortable living conditions.  His fitness was certainly in question given his avoidance of any slopes or stairs and the swollen foot episode two days previous.  He was feeling every one of his 73 years.  Or maybe he realized that his distant cousins just weren't going to be offering him a bed for a week or two.  Some grand combination of all of the above, I'm sure.  Still, it didn't stop me from being annoyed.  Even pissed off.  Our time in Calabria had been run on an open itinerary but I had made a concrete plan before we left for my eventual exit based on Cholo's own plan for hanging out for the next 3 weeks.  At this point I was prepared to get back home and looking forward to a brief cushion between my departure from Calabria and the anticipated grind of the flight home.  So now I had wasted the morning finding a place for Cholo to stay, a task I had been reminding him to take care of for days, only to have him shut all these options down.  Then a good chunk of the afternoon was being eaten away while I feverishly tried to get his flight changed and a Rome hotel arranged.  Any chance I had of seeing any part of Rome or relaxing on my last day was now dead and I wasn't happy about it.  Of course I wanted to help Cholo.  That was my entire reason for joining him on this adventure.  My frustration arose from him deciding at the last minute to do what seemed obvious from the get go while seemingly being committed to just the opposite until just moments earlier. 


Let's go home
After spending the past few hours failing to find Cholo new digs we retired to our apartment to give the laptop a chance to re-charge while we began to pack our bags.  After about an hour we set off again for Bar Ercole so I could Skype-call US Air and pose as Cholo to ask for a flight change.  After 20 minutes caught in their telephony system I was greeted by a human voice and another 10 minutes and $472 assfucking later Cholo was booked on the following Thursday's flight, Tuesday's being fully booked.  That meant we had to find Cholo a pace to stay in Rome and since I was already booked for a night back at the Crowne Plaza St. Peters that made the most sense.  We booked an additional two nights at a rate that would have kept us our apartment in Pizzo another week.  On second thought, maybe I should have extended?  Honestly the thought never occured to me and I was more than ready to go home.  I was annoyed by the morning's events and the day growing longer and longer while I worked on re-booting his itinerary.


By two Cholo had packed.  I had to walk over to the parking lot to fetch the car so before walking out I began to stage the bags on the narrow Via that bordered the tight two lane street we sat on.  I had successfully been able to squeeze next to the doorway with the hazards on to unload four days earlier and was hoping to do the same now in reverse.  Cholo insisted upon taking the bags out while I ran for the car so we could save a bit of time.  I gave way.  I found the car, pulled it in front and we loaded up with not too many angry honks from the few cars trapped behind us. 


I had my  swimsuit on so I could take a last dip in the Tyrrhenian sea.  I needed to mellow out for a moment and water is my heroin.  It was one of the best moments of the trip.  I love the motherfucking ocean.  I even dove down 20 feet to rescue a Heiniken bottle from the sugar sand bottom and introduce it to the trash when I trudged back on to the beach.  Pete Meyaart: International Recycler.  15 minutes later we were underway, cutting switchbacks up the mountains,  with a detour to the supermarket so Cholo could load his cooler up with food for the next two days of exile in Rome.  Somehow he managed to knock a bottle of Amaro off the belt at checkout, spraying sticky herb scented booze everywhere. The cashiers glared.  It just wasn't his day.  I lowered my eyes and we made a hasty exit. 


Finally by 4 we were on the Autostrade and on the long path back to Rome.  600 kilometers and more than six hours of driving stood ahead of us.  The GPS had our arrival time at the hotel at 10:30 but my aggressive driving was beginning to reel that in as I begged the hateful Lancia for everything it had.  Then the phone rang.  It was the proprietress of the B&B.  We had left a bag behind.  Cholo's laptop.  I steamed quietly and did my best to laugh it off while I turned the car around to backtrack an hour back to Pizzo.  I was gutted.  I had tried to stage the bags outside our B&B to avoid just this kind of problem and Cholo, prideful to a fault, insisted on doing the job himself.  It's no surprise that the combination of a bad memory and bunky eyesight left his most valuable possession behind.  He apoligized in his funny castellano idioms and while I was as frustrated as a man with no hands trying to tie his shoe laces I couldn't really be angry at him.  Maybe I should have insisted that I load all the bags myself, but I didn't want to treat the man like a baby.  I think he was feeling badly enough that afternoon after coming to a frank and unwanted conclusion about his ability to survive this place solo.  I dropped him off back at the B&B and stewed while I set out to make a u-turn, replaying the wasted morning, phone calls, research, delays, broken bottles and forgotten items in my mind.  I allowed myself to be pissed off internally, but didn't want to let any of that leak out to Cholo so I swallowed it all down.  By the time he had recovered his laptop and we set out again our arrival was now anticipated for well after midnight.  I grit my teeth knowing I was now looking at crossing the mountains in the dark and pushing against probable weariness.  That would only make the driving slower and more dangerous.  This was going to require a lot of coffee and thankfully I was in the right country to see that done.


Up, down, rinse, repeat
The A3 runs along the west coast of Italy from Reggio Calabria to Naples crossing over the Apennines once again.  Even worse the A3 has been undergoing massive renovations and expantions for years.  Much of the road sits on impossibly high and delicate looking briges while other sections literally bore through the center of mountains.  Currently they were building even higher bridges and wider tunnels.  I had seen some of this work on our day trip to Reggio Calabria but it became way more extensive as we headed north.  For almost 80 kilometers we were down to one lane, frequently stuck behind some slow going commercial vehicle while navigating narrow switchbacks and rutted pavement.  The A3 takes you up hundreds of meters and dumps you on the other side of some small range, over and over again.  Throw in shitty signage, no lighting, lots of trucks and trying to coax every molecule of speed out of a 1.3 diesel while changing gears incessantly between coffee and piss breaks and you have a jangled nerves cocktail.  I was drinking it deeply.   I consider myself a pretty good driver but I can't say I enjoy driving.  Between the cranky GPS directions, narrow roads, high speeds, tight spots, impatient drivers and impossible parking I had been dealing with the toughest driving I had ever seen.  Perhaps most painfully we had been driving through dramatic country with glorious vistas that oversee mountaintop villages and miles of blue sea and I had to keep my eyes rigidly on the grey asphalt in front of me. 


By 9PM the mountains faded and the roads began to straighten.  I had the Lancia pulling a solid 140 km/hr when I could but the car was at its reasonable limit for safety at that point.  Bumps and seams in the road floated us and would drop us hard on the backside,  eating up all of the travel in the suspention and bottoming the car out at high speed.  Once again kraut cars glided past us like birds in flight.  At midnight Rome came in to view and we pulled in to the parking lot of the hotel shortly after.  After settling in to our room, chowing on some bread and sausage and killing a bottle of wine we passed out, the misereable events of the day thankfully now in the past.


Home again, Home again, jiggity jig
5 Hours later I'm awake.  I tidy up the car searching every corner for anything Cholo might have left behind accidentally.  All clear.  In the hotel lobby they have a coffee station set up.  I find a styrofoam cup and fill it with noxious lukewarm coffee and add a creamer.  A moth floats on top, murdered by the wretchedness of the brew.  Somehow I've stumbled upon the Worst Cup of Coffee in Italy.  After notifying the proper authorities I shower and carefully pack my bags, tenderly wrapping the jars and bottles of delicacies I've been collecting, securing them in my sturdiest bag.  Ready, I say my farewell to Cholo and set out for the airport.  I dump the car and tally the mileage and fuel:  1567 miles, 41.5 gallons of diesel at a cost of $330 averaging 38 miles/gallon. 


Getting thru check-in is the spastic, time-wasting mess I expect and I'm at the gate with just 10 minutes before we board.  I do a quick run through duty free but nothing looks like a deal, including the 900 euro Prada handbag I'm sure my wife would love.  My smiling face and the sausages I've tucked away in my carry on will have to do. 


Except when I arrive in Philly a snotty little weiner dog sniffs my bag and the customs agents marks me for the agriculture line.  They confiscate the sausages and root throught my bag for other contraband ultimately setting me loose with a lecture and a warning instead of a $300 fine.  The customs agent did spend what seemed like way too much time typing on a computer which I'm sure has me marked for body cavity searches at customs for decades to come.  I get to the gate for my Philly-West Palm Beach flight with just minutes to spare.  It turns out I could have taken my sweet time.  We have trouble leaving the gate when a plane stalls out right behind us.  Then a brief but intense rainstorm shuts down all traffic for 15 minutes and we finally depart the gate only to learn the wind has shifted and we're now 60th in line ot take off.  Much later, 3 planes from takeoff, they shut down the runways for a corridor change and we limp back to the gate to re-fuel.  4 hours after first setting foot on the plane we're back where we started.  The passengers are irate and an old greek guys screams at the flight attendants "who is authority here!  You are being asshole to us!  We are not sheeps and goats!". Oh, but yes were are, sir.  Tired, I bleat weakly.  Another hour and multiple leg spasms later we're finally under way.  I'm too tired to sleep and half heartedly read my book, intermittently staring at other passengers like a delirious creep.   I hear the sound of crying and the plane smells like dirty diapers.  And that's just the elderly.


I arrive home, quietly unlock my door and drag my carcass inside.  Shedding my bags and clothes I dig out the PJs I've been wearing for the last week.  I'm too tired to argue with myself about their cleanliness.  When I enter my bedroom ready to slip in to bed next to my beautiful wife I find my youngest has snuck in beside her, monopolizing my side of the bed.  Oh yeah, I'm home.  I head back to the living room, find the couch and pull a beach towel over me for a blanket and finally close my eyes for the first time in more than a day. 

Festa Calabria

Day of Rest
Sunday got off to a late start. For me anyway. Cholo was up at 7 shuffling around the room and I'm not sure if he was trying to be quiet and not succeeding or trying to get me up and out of bed. I lean towards the latter because he spent the day anxiously awaiting the evening's event. Sunday was the crux of the Festa San Michele in Sciconi and since we learned of the lucky coincidence that it was happening while we were still here I think Cholo was anticipating it strongly. By noon Cholo was already taking a siesta and for the first time since we arrived I had some time to myself.

I hadn't been in the ocean since the few minutes I stole on our day trip to the Ionian coast so I walked through the piazza and down to the waterfront to have a little swim. The tiny beach was crowded with families enjoying the chamber of commerce weather. I swam around for 20 minutes and read my book for 20 more but the sun was overwhelming and the shadows short in the middle of the day. I made my way back to the fisherman's harbor and up the steep slope to Pizzo proper. When I entered Cholo was emerging from the bathroom and already had his best pair of pants on. The previous night I asked him exactly what time he wanted to be in Sciconi so I could make sure he was there when he wanted to be. He told me 6PM and by 2 he was already dressed in his best. Now I took a little nap and by 5:30 we were on our way.

The swimming lagoon at Pizzo.  The beach was to the right.

Mother Theresa goes for a walk
The tiny church in the tiny village of Sciconi is named for St. Michael but was recently dedicated to Mother Theresa. I guess the figured she's be canonized soon and they'd be one of the first churches on the block to be in line fo her good graces. As we pulled up to the square we caught one of the events I had been hoping to see: the Giganti. In this particular part of Calabria there's a tradtion of building these tall puppets with long robes. The young men in town wear these puppet costumes and dance around to the beat of drums during events just like this one. Shit, for all I know they do it for fun on the week-ends too. I haven't been able to find out to much about about how or why they exists but they seem to be modeled after saints or historical figures and we met a half dozen of them stomping down the road as we pulled up to the square.

Giganti, at rest.

 
Cholo made himself busy asking every old person he saw if they knew or remembered any of his relatives with little luck. He found a one-armed guy who used to work with Cousin Peppino in construction back in the sixties and that was about it. It seems all traces of the Catanias and Bonavotas had been erased from the village. In my mind they were lucky to get out because as charming as it is, the dusty half kilometer long village of Sciconi has very little going for it.

Cholo disappeared in to the church for more than an hour while the feast mass was held. It was being broadcast over loudspeakers so I listened to the priest drone on during the homily while I alternately took pictures and played games on my phone. Finally the mass ended and torch-bearing villagers began to line up in the square. Frankenstein's monster was noticibly absent.

A local horn & drum band cranked up a march while cheap fireworks snapped overhead. The song ended and the square lay silent for a minute when the priest called out a prayer and the square full of villagers began to sing a solemn verse and the procession made its way in two long lines down the road while the young men toted an illuminated statue of Mother Theresa alongside. The singing and chanting alternated as the entire village emptied down the road and it was at the same time serene and a bit spooky. Cholo said his goodbyes to the few oldsters he had been chatting with and we were off. He was likely looking at this place for the last time and I think he took great satisfaction at demonstrating to this village, even if no one one would know or remember it, that Carmella Bonavota Catania had sons that lived and prospered.

Ionica

It's Friday, Friday, Friday...
I was up late Thurday night writing this bullshit and awoke at 7:30 with minimal sleep to get Cholo ready for another run at his passport application, this time in Briatico.  Briatico sits on the sea and the village of Sciconi was and is a part of this municipality. 

Torre La Rocchetta, a 16th century Saracen tower on the beach of Briatico.

Once again Cholo is rejected and this one stings as the bureaucrat he deals with quickly dismisses him and leaves to go have a coffee with his girlfriend.  La puta que te pareo, hijo de puta!  etc.  After a quick stop at Briaticos port/beach I take Cholo to the picture postcard town of Tropea, the "capital" of the region and namesake of Calabrias most famous onion.  The views are beautiful but the beaches and streets are unpleasantly crowded. 

Santa Maria dell’Isola, on the Isola Bella, Tropea.

It's high season and I congratulate myself for not sleeping in this congested and just-a-bit-too-touristy city.  Cholo manages to embarrass me by doffing his shirt and strutting around the main piazza in blue pants with his underwear waistband hanging out, ostrich shoes and hairy man boobs on display.  He sits at a cafe to have a beer and I try to explain that it's good manners to wear a shirt but he laughs me off and enjoys his beer while I refuse to join him.  I guess I'm lucky he didn't strip down to just his underwear.  His informality and, dare I say, lack of manners can be charming at times but infuriating at others. 

Cholo enjoys a Moretti.

Honk
Saturday gets off to an unpleasant start when we awake to blaring horns at some ungodly hour.  Is it 2 or 3?  Someone is blocking the road, honestly it's little more than a mountain pass in a dense medieval village, right in front of our apartment.  A bus is involved somehow because you can't miss the extra-loud "hee haw, hee haw" honk it makes.  This goes on for MINUTES.  20 seconds would be enough to fuck your sleep up but this debacle is accompanied by a littany of horns and shouting and maybe a scream.  I was too delirious to say for sure.  I get back to sleep but my REM phase was well interruped and I konk out 'til nine.

The view from our room, Pizzo.

Roadtrippin'
I've read over and over again how beautiful the Bronzi di Riace are.  Rendered in the 6th century BC they were discovered underwater somewhere in the Messina strait and are currently undergoing restoration.  I wish I knew that before I went to Reggio Calabria to see them because all I really saw was a great view of their asses.  All two of them.  A wikipedia tour, which I've already seen, woulda been just fine. 

The drive to Reggio was cool, however.  The autostrade flirts with the mountains and you see a different sort of terrain as you head west to Calabria's tippy-toe.  The hills are scarred with brush fires and the smell of smoke is a constant.  We approached the village of Scilla with Sicily in the distance and it truly was one of those vistas that seems almost too picture postcard perfect.  And alliterative!  I pull off the autostrade to get a view of the beach and Messina to find a vespa with  General Lee paintjob. 

Scilla beach, with Sicily in the background.

The General Lee.

From Reggo Calabria we turned to the south and the Ionian sea.  You have to cross the Aspromonte mountains to get there. The Aspromonte are famous/infamous for being the site of various 'ndraghetta (mafia) acivities in the 70s and 80s including many kidnappings.  I think they held a Getty there and cut off his ear.  And to think VanGogh did it for shits and giggles.  Ascending from the seas to 1000 meters there was a terrific transition in geology, climate and plant life.  The lower hills were sparse and dry.  On the way up at Cittanova were copious olive and citrus groves while the top of the Aspromonte was covered with pine, cork oak, eucalyptus and wild fig.  I really shouldn't say the top of Aspromonte since the highest peak is almost 2K meters, but the 1000 meters we hit was plenty high and the great difference in temperature and scenery was astounding.  On the descent approaching our destination of Gerace, we found a little table and bench by the side of the road and stopped to have a bite.  The smell of pine and eucalyptus wafted in from a little grove of trees next to where we stopped as we dug in to a pecorino Cholo picked up from from a roadside stand 10 minutes previous.  It was about as nice a lunch as I've ever enjoyed despite having to beg off offers of beer and wine from the cooler.  The roads were the tightest and twistest we'd hit yet with rotten fences and embankments.  Adrenaline driven driving for sure.

Lunch, Calabrian style.

The oldest city in the world
OK, Gerace might not be that old but it has to be in the running.  A perfectly, and I mean perfectly, preserved medieval village on a stark hillside facing the Ionian sea it seems like an unappreciated or stealth historical trasure.  They have found artifacts from the 5 millenia BC in this village and even more old stuff since then.  As soon as you see a 18th century church you turn around and see one from the 14th century, and 13th, and then 10th. 

Church of San Giovanelli, 10th Century, Gerace.

The Baroque style altar (1664) from St. Francis of Assisi Church, 13th century.

The tomb of Nicola Ruffo, St. Francis of Assisi chruch, Gerace.

Detail from the tomb.

And that's the young stuff.  This city has spanned the prehistoric era thru the phoenicians and greeks, survived the Roman, Syracusan and Moorish conquests blah blah blah.  At some point you just get tired of taking pictures of old things when everything is old.  It's still a vibrant, active town and the inhabitants seem non-plussed by all the history that surrounds them while I gape.  I see them out chatting or complaining or fighting.  A band of guys in their teens and 20s hang out on a bench playing Calabrian songs on accordian and tambourine, not for dough but with their wives and kids.  Gerace is dead; long live Gerace.

Music on the old ramparts.

Same guys on the street, Gerace.

It all has to end somewhere
We're running later than I expected, not that I've had a real schedule or itinerary.  I really wanted to see the cathedral of Cattolica in the village of Stilo, 25 miles north of Gerace.  I've seen pictures of it's unique Byzantine style roof circa 900 and want to see it with my own eyes.  But it's getting late and I can see Cholo is waning, plus we've hit some sort of traffic jam near some seaside town along the way.  Neapolitan assholes on a week-end shore run, no doubt.  I pull off to the beach and decide it's time to give up.  I'll never get to Stilo in time for there to be light and I know I won't see shit.  Cholo takes a siesta on the wall by the beach while I change in to my suit and take a quick dip in the Ionian sea.  The pebbly beach gives way to cool, glassy blue water and I feel extra floaty.  I wonder if it's because the salinity is higher here but decide it's probably just because I'm especially fat at the moment.  After 15 minutes I make my way back up the beach to dry off and Cholo is still passed out on the wall except now there's about a hundred flies or mosquitos or some other insect forming a swirling cloud above his feet.  I know his daughters would laugh if they could see this.

Cholo, taking a siesta.

In this story our Hero can't find a goddamed parking space.  After a shot of espresso we turn our backs to the Ionian sea and arrive in Pizzo shortly before 10PM.  Cholo jokes the whole way back across the mountains and very generously doesn't act scared when I squeeze what I can out of the Lancia on the black and twisty roads.  We find the town slammed with humanity.  Pizzo is famous for gelato and the Piazza Nationale has no less than 10 places to get your ice cream on.  Therefore it follows that every man, woman, child and nonna for kilometers around rushes to Pizzo centrale after dinner to meander and have a taste.  That means that they've arrive by car and the normally liberal parking opportunities (by Calabrian standards anyway) have evaporated.  Every parcheggio, and I've discovered them all by now, is license plate to license plate tight.  After finding nothing open on my first pass I drop Cholo off at the apartment to save him a walk and set out on my own.  *Aside: I've mentioned Cholo forgets everything.  When I dropped him off he forgot his hat, one of his two cell phones, his camera bag and one of his two cameras, yet he remembered the 3 beers he left in the trunk.  Priorities.

Pizzo, night approaching.

For the next hour I drive in circles.  I'm stuck in traffic while big nosed girls and skinny guys with murses and popped collars line up in front of waterside discos.  Spots I wouldn't have ever considered parking I noticed are full on a second pass.  I'm outclassed.  These folks know how to park like a motherfucker.  Only down neck Newark comes close for the sheer audacity.  I find one spot but move when I realized I'm blocking all but the skinniest Fiats.  Finally, after more than an hour, I find a spot just one spot in front of where I've parked for the last 2 days.  I approach the parking attendant to pay the fee and he waves me off telling me that spot is free.  Ultimately I guess I got lucky, but I'm too tired, hungry, thirsty and smelly to appreciate it.

Pizzo, sunset.

"I'm not Italian, I'm Calabrese"

SkypeI'm writing from the village of Pizzo, on the south cost of the Tyrrhhean sea just after midnight. Cholo & I just returned from the Piazzo where we ate gelato, drank grappa and made Skype calls back home.  Skype is the shit.  Aside from instant messaging and free skype-to-skype calls, we've been making face-to-face video alls too.  Plus they have a cool skype-to-voice feature that's pretty cheap so we've been able to make voice calls to any # internationally for next to nothing.  It's amazing that you can sit in an outdoor cafe in nowheresville Calabria and still get a free wireless internet connection.  I wish getting my phone hooked up was this easy; so far it's been a giant FAIL.

Pizzo!

Boy Petey
After a mosquito-bitten, interrupted sleep our first night in Catanzaro I awoke for the third time at 10:30.  My ass was tired.  I'm enjoying myself but also working my ass off.  I am chaffeur, tour guide, travel agent and valet.  Cholo has goals he wants to accomplish like finding his parent's home, or applying for an Italian passport and I am making sure these things happen.  It's kicking my ass a little bit.  I'm over 40 and out of shape with a bum ankle.  We don't eat.  It's hot as shit, but that at least I'm used to.  Cholo's perfect idiomatic knowledge of Italian, and specifically the Calabrian dialect, is the grease on my wheels.  It's amazing that this is his first time to Italy and no one can believe he's from Argentina.  He speaks an old dialect of Calabrese that's just too authentic. 

Cholo at the top of Catanzaro looking Sosuth, the Ionian sea in the background.

An iron dragon and stone lion, above the pharmacy, Catanzaro.

Memories
Cholo has many.  No shortage.  I'm learning more details of his and his family's life everyday.  I feel very lucky.  Details like these I can not get from my Mom since she's dead.  My Dad is recalcitrant about the Meyaarts aside from names and dates; I think not so much because he's unwilling to reveal the past but because I don't think he realizes that anyone would care since he doesn't seem to himself. 

Cholo's short term memory, however, is failing.  I'm sure May has noticed and somehow I have not despite 25 years in close contact.  Patience is a virtue and for this I am a virtuous man.  He struggles to remember where he left his phone, phone card, glasses, phone numbers and documents.  He forgets new names immediately.  I'll wait until he finds what he needs and won't embarrass him by doing the looking for him.  I just realized that I worry that he may forget details of this very trip as it occurs.  He's almost 73 now and for the first time I think I see the shadow of age on him.  When we first met in the late 80s Cholo would haul cast iron radiators out of the back of his truck like they were loaves of bread.  I've continued to see him with this aura of impenitrable strength but finally I see how hard it is for him to walk and climb and move all day.  He's still terrifically vibrant and witty and my main take away is that he's finally here in his parent's homeland with much of his strength and intellect intact.  It's terrific to watch, but I feel like he wishes this could have happened 20 years ago.

Here's one story I like.  When we visited Cousin Peppino he was recounting stories of Cholo's older brother Rafa's visit to Sciconi in '53.  I asked why Rafa came to Sciconi.  To work?  Cholo laughs.  Hard.  "My broda?  To work?  Non.  He go to show da people he ees alive."  Turns out his parents and their extended family all saved money to return a family member to Sciconi.  Rafa was eldest and when he turned 18 he was the envoy.  This was a deliberate move by Carmella Catania (Bonavota), Cholo's mother.   She lost 3 children in Calabria, suffering the disgrace of having her dead babies scooped out of her with a spoon.  In Calabria.  In the 20s.  She came to Argentina and has 3 boys from the age of 39 to 42 and Rafa was the middle finger in the face of those who scolded, insulted and criticized her failure to make children.  She never returned to Italy for this reason.  Calabria left her barren and Argentina gave her fruit.  Heavy stuff.

Sciconi, baby
Wednesday and Thursday turned out to be big failures in Cholo's hunt to apply for italian citizenship.  *An aside:  Cousin Mimmo warned that I should try not to call him "Cholo" while I'm here, at least not in public.  It's Southern italian slang for "pussy".  Figures.  Calling him Nick is very strange and I rarely remember.  I blurt out "Cholo" and get surprised looks from ladies.  Hey, what if you came to the US from Bangladesh and called your father-in-law "cunt".  I get it.

Catanzaro's oddly what I expected, and not so.  Provincial?  Yes.  Sophisticated?  Yes, but how?  It's tiny.  Good luck finding a man in shorts.  There's a formality that I like and I was prepared.  Cholo shuffles around in cargo shorts and looks ike he fits.  How could he not?  It's a crazy ascent of switchbacks to get to the main gov't zone and my driving is zoned in.  But for the Lancia I'd be the shit.  Did I mention what cousin Mimo said when he learned I was driving a Lancia Musa?  "Musa?  E una machina feminina, no?".  With a smirk.

A via in Catanzaro.

Thursday AM we leave Catanzaro and make for Sciconi.  I let the GPS do the talking and switch the language from English to Italian because the American English computer voice can't pronounce Italian and fucks up all the street names.  I've been hating the GPS for taking me down crazy tiny streets that I ought not travel and misleading me now and again.  Always trust your instincts!  However for the voyage to Sciconi it's a nerve jangling blessing.  I imagined that we would approach the village from the sea, the North.  Instead we're led from the mountain village of Vibo Valentia to the South and we traverse tiny one-lane roads thru abandoned or barely farmed olive groves.  At one point we're led thru a tiny village and I have to drive 40 meters in reverse when a 8 foot wide road narrows to 6.  The smell of burning clutch is like insense.  I have video too.

Approaching Sciconi.

An abandoned farmhouse.  This area had a huge earthquake in 1906 and many buildings were abandoned at that time.

Coming down the mountain.

Finding we have no where left to go. 

Down the mountain we come and finally we meet Via Sciconi.  We pull up to the village Church to pay our respects: Chiesa San Michele.  I have a kick ass picture of Saint Michael stomping on Lucifer's head.  Lucifer is bummed. 

Unhappy Satan.

Within moments Cholo has found a new friend, an old person to commisserate with.  Cholo should walk around with the word "gregarious" in glowing capital letters above his head.  In Rome it was embarrassing when he shouted "Mabuhay" to every asian person he saw, Filipino or not.  Here it pays off when he finds Niccolino, 80 years young (for real).  Turns out Cholo's mother did Niccolino's father's laundry.  Small world, in Sciconi maybe. 

Nicolino, 80 years old, leads us to the old Bonavota house.

Niccolino walks us down to the address of Cholo's mother's old house.  It's gone now, replaced by something modern, but old buildings flank it.  We walk to the back to see the pasture that belonged to Michele and Carmela Catania.  She was a baker, but her oven has been demolished.  You still get a very clear and poignant sense of their land and their life.  Marginal but noble, leaving aside any kind of phony romanticism about how "pure" life may have been in dirt poor, third world Calabria. 

21 Via Sciconi, the site of Cholo's parent's house.

The gate leading to the pasture begind Via Sciconi 21.  Carmella Bonavota's old oven has since been demolished.  She was a baker.

Niccolino takes us to visit a possible cousin where Cholo makes a new friend and it's not important whether they're actually related or not.   After we're invited to Niccolino's modest home, directly next to the church and main square where he pours us a cold beer and desists, telling us he only drinks wine himself.  Niccolino's 100 year old (at least!) mother clears the table of empty bottles and glasses.  She stinks.  It's too real to be surreal. 

Cholo, Nicolino and his ancient mother.

A corner of Nicolino's home: garlic, Tropea onions and cast irons pans used to make conserve.

We learn Sciconi's annual festival is this Sunday.  Luck?  Cholo insists it's the work "de lo Pibe arriba", the kid upstairs.  We depart with plans to return Sunday and Cholo is quiet but smiling broadly.  I'm so happy that he's so happy.

The schedule.

Idiomas
I have 6 years of French that can get me thru simple conversations and tight spots.  I've never had a Spanish lesson but I've been studying "Castellano" in Cholo's home for almost 25 years.  I've noticed lately, or at least in the 5 years that Cholo has lived near us in WPB that he's spoken less and less English.  This trip has been an excellent workshop.  80% of my speech has been in Spanish, 15% in English when Cholo loses me and 5% in Italian or its slurry cugino Calabrese.  I can understand Italian pretty well but can hardly speak it.  I know enough to get by with numbers and simple pronouncements.  It's so close to French and Spanish that I'm sure I could learn if I had time.  I have no time.  Gawd I'd like to be able to speak I-tal-yan.  * Aside: Cholo has been shit on for the past 40+ years for his poor English.  I know that my wife's stunning abilities in the business world have their foundation in working as Cholo's translator and office manager since she was 9.  The man speaks 5 languages and unfortunately English is his worst.  I give him a lot of credit for his accomplishments in life despite an education that ended at 11, and before that was just part-time because he needed to work to contribute to the family.  Since the age of 6.  And what do I have to bitch and moan about again?

Pizzo
I made arrangements to stay in Pizzo, a tiny seaside village on the Tyrrhhean sea.  Pizzo!  2000 people, I think, but it swells a bit in August when the Neapolitans arrive for their summer vacation.  Pizzo is famous for gelato and a dozen gastronomicas/gelaterias crowd the main square battling for customers.  Cholo and I eat pistacchio and drink grappa.  La vite e bella!  Girls with big noses sing karaoke and line dance.  It's weird and corny and fun.  Lots of guys wear murses.  I think of Galiafinakis in the Hangover insisting that "it's called a satchel.  Indiana Jones wears one".

Pizzo at night.  Can you find the three murses?

Rome to Brindisi

Vecchia Roma
After a brief nap Sunday evening Cholo & I made our way back in to the center of town.  We drove around for a bit, trying to get a sense of the city and avoiding collisions non-stop.  Rome is rally car territory, an every-person-for-themself gas and deisel driven free for all.  Oddly it's less intimidating to drive in than NYC.  I give credit to small cars and stick shifts.  I think the perfect car for Roman driving would be a Cooper Mini: low to the ground, nimble, good wheelbase and able to fit into tight places. 


Antiqity abounds.  Rome is like a collage of buildings cobbled together over 3 millenia, patched together but never dissonant.  Your head cranes to see the old, the very old and the very very old.  I don't know how much more time I would need here to see everything I'd care to. Weeks probably.

Monday morning we carve out a couple hours to visit the Vatican.  Really just St. Peter's Square.  Trying to find parking anywhre close is a problem but I manage to find a quiet, shady space not too far away,  Unfortunately there are some stairs involved as we navigate our way around the city's massive walls and towards the entrance to the square.  Cholo struggles a bit with the climb and we breathe deeply every time we feel a bit of cooling breeze creep over the hill.

Tourists.

The Coliseum, taken from the window of our Lancia as we drive out of town. 

Hey, we were in a hurry.

Fountains
Public water fountains can be found everywhere you go in Italy.  I'm not talking about big, ornate fountains like you might find in a park or piazza, but small fountains designed for the practical purpose of supplying clean, fresh drinking water to anyone who has a hankering.  We saw our first in Rome but found them in every village and city we visited, usually with an inscription stating when it was built and in who's honor.  Apparently this tradition of supplying copious amounts of free public water goes back to the old acqueduct system the Romans built and has been carried forward since then.  Nowadays they're a great place for you (or your dog) to get a drink but in the past these fountains supplied the public with cooking and bathing water before indoor plumbing became commonplace.

A fountain near the Porta Cavalleggeri.  Two inscriptions in marble lie above it, one for Pope Pius IV for installing it in the 16th century and another for Pope Clement XI who had it repaired in 1713.

The fountain in Piazza San Michele, Sciconi, Calabria.

Rome to Brindisi
Cholo has cousins in Brindisi, a small but very ancient city in Puglia, the "heel" of Italy.  Monday morning after possibly the Best Coffee I Ever Had (more on that later) we pack up, take a last look at Rome and head South.  With close to 400 miles ahead of me I start to get the feel of the Lancia Musa on the open road, all 1.3 liters willing themselves along the autostrade.  Of course just outside Rome we hit a 4K traffic jam behind an accident and all momentum is lost.  A dead stop for almost 45 minutes.  We move again but I'm drowsy and am literally slapping and pinching mysef to stay awake until the next rest stop.


Cafe
I'm a coffee drinker.  In moderation.  I never drank coffee before meeting May and her family.  I couldn't understand how they could make a pot of percolated coffee at 9:30 at night just after dinner.  I've since developed the taste if not quite the appalling addiction to coffee.  When we left the Crowne Plaza in Rome Cholo & I deliberately avoided the hotel restaurant and their $18 euro "american breakfast" and simply drove around until we found a quiet neighborhood with an unassuming "gastronomica" like thousands and thousands of others, I'm sure.  Italian breakfast is coffee and "brioche", or pastry.  Cholo has cappucino and I had caffe latte and that motherfucker was better than any coffee I remember.  Crazy good.  And every coffee since has been amazing.  We stop at a stand by the autostrade on the A1 to Brindisi and the espresso I had there was like black cocaine.  Plus the gas station is loaded with sandwiches of freshly sliced prosciutto and mortadella.  I could imagine an Italian stopping at the Vince Lombardi rest stop on the NJ Turnpike for coffee and a sandwich and reeling at the vomit they serve.  I've seen Italians act laissez faire about a bunch of things but coffee is definitely not one of them. 


Mimo, Sara & Peppino
Pictures coming soon!  We arrive in Brindisi late Monday night and check into our shitty hotel by the ferry that takes folks back and forth to Greece.  At least the AC works.  The next morning Cholo calls his 2nd cousin Mimo. I'm a bit worried.  Cholo has made a lot of effort to set up this visit with Mimo via email over the course of a few months and has seen few replies.  I'm not sure any kind of meet is going to happen.  And what's worse, Cholo's cousin Raphael died just 3 weeks ago at the age of 85.  Raphael and his wife Sara lived across the street on Pasaje Coligue when Cholo was growing up, but he hadn't seen either since the late 80s. 

Sara Bonavota, 91, and Cholo

Cholo gets a call and it's Mimmo; he's on his way.  Tall, tan, grey and balding, Mimo is in his early 50s with 3 kids (Sara, Allessandro and Barbara) between 16 and 3.  Mimo takes us on a short tour of Brindisi's major attractions and we set off to meet his mother, Sara.  Cholo doesn't exactly have fond memories of Sara.  The one word that keeps coming up in his description of her is "seca": dry.  It's true.  Our welcome is a bit stiff, we're offered only water to drink and Sara makes a big point of turing off all the lights in the apartment after we enter before complaining about the poor price she (imagines) she got when she sold her house in B.A. in the 90s. 

Pete, Mimmo, Alessandro, Sara Irene, Little Barbara and Cholo

After a long story recounting the sad and painful death of Cholo's cousin Rapphael, the door opens and a breath of fresh air enters.  Peppino.  Peppino is year younger than the deceased Raphael and a cousin Cholo has never met.  He too was born and raised in Sciconi and knew  Cholo's mother Carmela until she left for Argentina when he was 8.  He's everything you would hope and old Calabrese to be: funny, animated, smiling and energetic.  He launches in to a story about when Cholo's older brother Rafa came to see him in '53; something about a haircut gone wrong.  My understanding of spoken Italian is servicable but I can hardly make out a thing Peppito is saying in his Calabrian dialect.  Cholo is smiling from ear to ear and I see immediately that this kind of interaction is exactly what he's been looking for, not La Seca.  Peppino pours us vermouth in his best glasses and Cholo "cagar por risa"; shits from laughing. 

Peppino

Peppino tells a tale

We say goodbye and Mimmo takes us to a great dockside restaurant for lunch and then to his beach/pool club "Palm Beach".  The irony is not lost.  Mimmo talks incessantly about cars and his job, easing from clipped Italian to loquatious Castellano (Argentine Spanish) when he has a few drinks, and back again as he sobers up.  His family is lovely and his wife Irene works the rust out of her English as we sit by the Adriatic sea. 

Mimmo and Cholo at Club Palm Beach

We come all the way to Puglia to see Palm Beach?

Lancia Due: Brindisi to Catanzaro
7 PM comes and we are way late to depart for Calabria.  5 hours later than I expected.  That said my expectations were based on air and rumor so no worries.  This means, however, that I have to drive 230 miles down to the Ionian sea and cross the Calabrian Apennines in the dark.  The advantage is that I'm not distracted by what I'm sure would be stunning scenery so I can concentrate on the road.  The negative is that I'm snaking across mountain passes in total darkness in a thin-tired car with a whining 1.3 diesel.  I covet every Audi, BMW and Mercedes that smoothly travels the roads like buttermilk dripping down an Austrian girl's chin.  Frank would love to slam these roads in his Miata, and I'd like ot have a turn behind the wheel in the Miata myself.  I feel like a cook with a dull knife in this car.  If I can I'm going to find a Europcar Tomorrow and change it for the Peugeot 207 I expected.  It's only a 1.4 but at least it's gas, lower to the ground and way more aero.  I never thought I'd jones for a 2.0 liter engine in my life until this moment.  My Caddy would eat this car and shit out a tin can.

Rome

From Sunday, July 31

 

 

Alive

So far so good.  I'm sitting here in my hotel lobby in Rome waiting for my room.  It's 2 in the afternoon and I'm trying to will myself to stay awake until at least 8PM.  I didn't sleep a wink on the 9 hour flight over here last night.  I gave Cholo the aisle seat and squirmed around in the few cubic feet of space US Air allows you while watching 2 year old "Dangerous Catch"  episodes.  I also saw Green Hornet and I'm not sure what was worse: the movie or my coffin-like posture during those two dreadful hours.

 

 

Buongiorno Roma

The weather here in Rome is better than perfect.  The lunch we just ate less so.  It was so bad Cholo didn't even eat the shrimp in his Papardelle a la fruitti di mare.  I've seen him eat fossilized seafood before so these camarones had to be on a new level of bad for Cholo to forgo. 

 

 

The Lancia
I rented a car from Europcar.  I prepaid and chose the Peugeot 207, knowing what a big fan of French cars Cholo is.  No, I'm not kidding.  Instead I have something called a Lancia.  Diesel.  Beat to shit.  I'll have to go in to more detail as I get to know the car but for starters I'm trying to figure out what the RPM gauge is so far to the right.  Like almost in front of the passenger right.  I hope to drive it directly into the fiery maw of Mt Etna.

I had a hostile relationship with this car.