1/27/2019 0 Comments carife, land of my forefathersAt Ellis Island in New York, you can find the names of people who entered the country during the world's largest ever mass migration, in the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The records include Pietro Melchonne, whose real surname was Melchionne and who was known as Pietro Malchione in the United States. In 1909 Pietro, 13, arrived on the ship Berlin, to a world totally different from where his journey began in the village of Carife in Campagna, Italy.
Pietro's story is not romantic. His mother had passed away several years before and his father's new wife had children of her own, and she decided Pietro was not to obtain the family business or any inheritance. So Pietro left behind his two brothers, who would live the rest of their lives in Carife, and moved to the New World. From New York he ended up in Pennsylvania, where his four sons became mushroom farmers in Kennett, the self-proclaimed Mushroom Capital of the World. One of those sons is my grandfather. Carife was not on our itinerary when we visited Italy, not because it didn't interest us, but because it seemed impossible to get there. The train did not arrive anywhere close, and the only bus was a 3.5-hour ride that started in Naples at 7am and returned from Carife at 3pm two days a week. But on our last night in Naples, our AirBnB hostess told us her friend would drive us to Carife for half the cost of a taxi. With no planning or investigation into possible long lost relatives still in the area, we traveled to the land of my forefathers the following day. The village was closer to the city than we thought, just a 1.5 hour drive in a tiny car that zipped around tractor trailers and through traffic on a highway that hugged the coastline before traversing into the mountains. From the highway a steep one-lane dirt road, which pushed the tiny car to its limits, led us through an olive grove and to Carife. We got out of the car and looked around. The village was on the edge of a hill, overlooking the rest of Campagna and its olive groves and evergreens. Hilly, cobblestone streets hugged by multicolored homes with red roofs went in every direction. The town seemed desolate as we walked, hoping to find someone who knew of the Melchionne family. After several blocks of admiring the architecture and views, we spotted an older man walking towards us. We practiced the little Italian we knew. Now our mission was to begin. "Conosci i Melchionne?" Do you know the Melchionnes? His brow narrowed and eyes squinting, he asked which Melchionnes. The tiny town had four different families with that name. We had no answer. Realizing our Italian was not up to par, the man walked us to a pizzeria not far from where we met. Inside were two men playing checkers, an older woman at the counter preparing espresso, and a pizza maker who appeared to be in his twenties- and who, we found out, spoke Italian, English and Spanish - a translator who knew everyone in town! Upon realizing we only had a few hours in Carife, our new friend began frantically calling everyone with the last name Melchionne, as I wrote down the name of every relative, starting with Pietro, I could think of. We spent the following few hours speaking with older men and women who entered the pizzeria to figure out if any of them was a relative of mine. One woman even brought in her family tree; she heard me say there was a Helen in my family, and so thought it might be the same Helen in her family. Another man brought us into the municipality to bring up records, of which the town keeps on file for everyone who was ever born, married, or died in Carife. After this great effort we came to a sad conclusion; none of the Melchionnes in modern Carife appears to be relatives of mine. According to the town records, Pietro's family had passed away in Carife and their descendants moved away years ago. Shortly after this realization was made it was almost time to return to Naples to catch our evening train back to Rome. But before that, we had some time to look around town again. There was an old cemetery that was closed after 1980, when an earthquake killed many. A memorial on the side of the municipality commemorated those who were lost. The date of the tragedy was November 23, 1980, or thirty-eight years to the day before our visit. Also on the sides of the building were two lists of names, each of the men who left the village to fight in a world war and never returned. I wondered if those men fought against Americans, then realized it didn't really matter. Like so many small, quaint villages, Carife holds a hidden history, obscured by its curtain of tranquility, smiles, views of rolling hills and olive groves, and a pretty plaza. The appearance of a tiny paradise is betrayed by the old cemetery, which filled up prematurely when the earthquake hit, and the names of men lost in both World Wars written on the sides of the municipality building. But it is betrayed even more by the village septuagenarians, cut off from relatives in chaotic times before the inventions of Facebook, the internet, and even phonebooks helped us stay in touch. These people took time out of their regular days to step inside a restaurant and talk to two foreign strangers, with the hope of connecting with family they've never met but know exist still visible in their eyes. Carife is a beauty undercut by uncertainty, perhaps a perfect symbol for much of Italy, or Earth for that matter, at this moment in time.
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AuthorBrad Goodman Archives
January 2019
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