Taste: My Life through Food(12)

Unlike in America, there were no school lunches. School started at around eight thirty and finished at one p.m., at which time everyone went home for the midday meal and an afternoon rest. To compensate for these short hours, we did however have classes on Saturday mornings from nine a.m. to twelve p.m. I loved these hours, as they gave me much more free time in the afternoons. Of course, this schedule was conceived with the assumption there would always be an adult at home to care for the children when they arrived for lunch. Today things have changed distinctly, but in the Italy of the early seventies there was always someone, usually a mother or a grandparent, in the household at any given time of the day.

Having an adult present at home consistently was of even greater importance when spring brought warm weather as, purely by coincidence I am sure, during this time teachers’ strikes became more frequent. We had experienced a few strikes by the faculty throughout the year, but we were usually told in advance if and when one was pending. What exactly these sudden walkouts pertained to we never knew, but as kids we welcomed them. By the time spring had fully arrived—the trees were in blossom, the blue Italian sky floated overhead, and summer was just around the corner—the strikes were even more frequent and came without any forewarning. I remember walking to school a number of times and entering halls that were empty of staff, with the exception of some administrator who would tell those of us milling about looking for some kind of guidance, “Ragazzi! Non c’è’ scuola oggi. C’è’ un sciopero. Tornate a casa!” (“Kids! There is no school today. There is a strike. Go home!”)

And so we would go home. Happily.

When the strikes first began, my mother of course questioned my unexpected return, and I would cheerily explain that there was a strike. At first she and my father were shocked. They both worked in an American high school, where nothing like this would ever happen. But eventually, as the teachers absented themselves with more frequency and I regularly reappeared in the apartment a mere half hour after having just left, she would roll her eyes and shake her head.

My sisters were enrolled in a Catholic school, and because nuns are not inclined to protest for better wages or shorter hours, they were schooled consistently. However, for me, although I did learn proper Italian, my schooling in Italy was the best education I almost had.

At this point in the chapter I would write about all of the food I ate in Italy over the course of that year, but I am afraid that, unless we were traveling to another city to sightsee or visiting relatives in Calabria, we ate at home. The sabbatical required that my father’s salary be reduced for his year abroad, and even though the bygone Italian lira was very weak compared to the American dollar, it still made no sense for our family to dine out. Even when we traveled through the country by train, my parents always bought all the ingredients to make sandwiches as opposed to paying extra to buy them premade. This means that not until I began to travel to Italy on my own many years later would I begin to experience the wonder and diversity of native Italian cooking.

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.