Yet, there is one meal I remember having during the trip to Calabria. We were in the city of Cittanova, deep inside the toe of the Italian boot, where both my maternal grandparents were born, but only my grandfather still had relatives there. He and my grandmother had come to visit us in Florence, and we all made the pilgrimage to their hometown. Like most of the cities in Calabria and throughout the south, Cittanova was still a very poor place then. My first impression was that I had gone far back in time. Compared to Florence, there were significantly fewer cars, the buildings were crumbling, and most of the inhabitants wore black, as was the tradition south of Rome when a family member had died. But because most families were so large, there was always somebody dying on any given day, so basically everyone just wore black all the time. My relatives all wore black for this reason, but in particular because one of the patriarchs had been killed accidentally in a Mafia shooting. It seems he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, meaning he was walking next to someone who was the target of a hit and he himself caught the better part of a shotgun blast. However, I did hear recently that this was a slight whitewashing of the truth. No one will probably ever know for certain what happened, and perhaps it’s best that we never do.
Although the streets of Cittanova were very clean, as I said, the majority of the buildings were in disrepair, to put it mildly. People were living in houses that had been built hundreds of years before, many still had hard-packed dirt floors and often no indoor plumbing. The house we stayed in belonged to one of my grandfather’s sisters and had tiled floors, but no hot running water. I remember my dad going out to the stone shed in the small back garden and shaving with hot water that had been boiled on the stove because there wasn’t even an indoor bathroom. In fact, an indoor toilet had only recently been installed. But only a toilet. No sink.
We stayed in Cittanova for five days, allowing my grandparents to catch up with the family and for us to get to know them. There were my grandfather’s two sisters, their children, and then their children, plus other cousins and then even more cousins and so on, all of whom lived within a very short walk or drive of one another. I remember being slightly overwhelmed by the amount of my maternal DNA in every room at any given moment.
I don’t remember ever leaving the city confines, with the exception of one trip to the mountains. Our relatives decided we were going to have a feast to celebrate our visit, and at the center of this feast would be a goat. A couple of the men asked my dad if he wanted to join them on the drive to buy the goat, and he asked if I wanted to tag along. As I was in a very hot city where there was little for a boy my age to do, I jumped at the chance. We hopped in a car and drove about forty minutes up into the Calabrian mountains. It is a harsh landscape but cultivated wherever possible by its resourceful inhabitants. I had never seen land so dry, so coarse, so stubbornly beautiful. But perhaps the highlight for me was that every few miles we would pass a pillbox still standing since the war that had ended almost thirty years before. As a World War II obsessive, I was agog and my heart began to race as I pictured Allied troops battling it out with their Axis counterparts on the very land that surrounded me. Even now, almost eighty years since the end of the war, Italy still has a great number of pillboxes that remain intact, particularly on the coasts of Sicily, Sardinia, and the mainland’s southern shores. Like so many things that have been discarded or are disused, in the poorer parts of the world, the pillboxes are put to practical use. In Sardinia I have seen them used for storage by seaside restaurateurs or as a shed for a local farmer, and in Sicily as a nighttime retreat for teenagers looking for privacy to do whatever teenagers do in private, which in every country always includes tatty blankets, cheap alcohol, and condoms. Not that any of us would know.
We arrived at a small hut at the top of a mountain from which one could see across all of Calabria from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Ionian, or so it seemed. We met the goatherd, who was an old man dressed as though he were out of a children’s storybook, complete with thick woolen trousers, a corduroy coat, and a felt hat. After a few minutes money was exchanged （my father insisted on chipping in but his attempts were shooed away by his in-laws）; the skinned, gutted, and cleaned carcass of a goat was placed into the trunk of the car; and we made our descent back toward Cittanova.
Unfortunately, I was not privy to the preparation of the goat, but I remember sitting down at the long table with these newfound great-aunts, uncles, and second and third cousins, all of whom were thrilled that we were visiting and made us feel so welcome. They talked animatedly over one another in the Calabrese dialect, which was practically indecipherable to me even though by then I spoke Italian very well. They passed around bottles of wine; told jokes; offered “brindisi,” spontaneous rhyming toasts in honor of beloved guests; and of course devoured the goat, which was delicious.