Finding Campobasso

Finding Campobasso

May 2011

 Bobbi and I in Cifelli, Italy

            Campobasso is tucked quietly into the Apennine mountains in south-central Italy, away from all major highways.  Like most Italian cities that are not along the beaten travel paths, it is not very well known, even though it is the capital city of the region called Molise.    When I was a boy and asked the family elders where in Italy our family had come from, I was disappointed that our home town wasn’t one of the better-known ones, like Venice, Florence, Rome, Genoa, Naples, Palermo, etc.  Neither was it very southerly (why couldn’t it be a town in Calabria or Sicily?) or near either the Adriatic Sea to the east or that branch of the Mediterranean known as the Tyrrhenian Sea to the west.  No, we were from Campobasso, a town nobody had ever heard of in a region of the country that no one ever visited.  It didn’t matter of course, certainly not in the grand scheme of things, and not even in the daily world of important things that made up my life in the Italian-American third ward of East Orange, NJ, and yet it would have been a better thing, I always thought, if our family had come from one of those places that had cachet, one of the places that readers of travel magazines run across on a regular basis.  A place I could be proud of.  That is more or less what I thought of my family’s birthplace for most of my life, until that is, May 2011, when Bobbi and I decided to put Campobasso on our list of cities to visit on our twelfth trip to Italy.  We wouldn’t dally there, but we would track it down and see it—at last.

            We’d been going to Italy since the early 1990s, not exclusively of course, for we were curious about many European destinations and have by now seen many of them too, but Italy had always been special.  Our love affair with Italy had begun with a hurried bus tour that took us from Venice to Florence to Rome in ten exhausting days.  I remember sitting in what seemed to be just another of the endless Italian piazzas, this one in Florence, when the tour director, who had mercifully given us a chance to get off our feet for a few moments, happened to look up.  “Oh, by the way,” he said, “behind you is the basilica of Santa Croce which was begun in 1294 and completed in 1442.”  I had noticed its beauty when we entered the piazza, but in truth, it hadn’t impressed me; it’s easy to get blasé about cathedrals in Italy, even in a week. 

I turned again to look at it and inwardly shrugged my shoulders.  “Inside the basilica,” he went on, “Michelangelo and Galileo are buried.  Also Machiavelli and Rossini.  Dante was born in Florence and would be buried here too, but his remains are in Ravenna, where he died, and the city fathers there will not send him home to be buried in Santa Croce—but there is a huge tomb for him inside anyway, just in case they soften and send him home where he belongs.”  By now he had all my attention.  We went inside and there were tears in my eyes as I stood in front of the tombs.  I was unprepared for the emotional storm that had suddenly overwhelmed me.  And from that instant, I could not get enough of Italy, where treasures pile up like stones on a pyramid.  In fact you cannot exhaust them.  And when you factor in the other attractions, like the music, the food, the sunny weather, the sunny people, the wine, the flowers, Italy became at once our go-to European destination.  We’ve never gotten enough of it.

We learned on our first trip, however, that the familiar Venice to Florence to Rome trifecta was way too much, so we decided to do it a little differently when we returned.  That trip, two years later, would be spent entirely in Rome, which instantly had become our favorite city in our favorite country.  We spent two weeks in late December and early January, totally out of season, walking and never waiting on long lines to see everything the city had to offer.  We were relentless on our marches around town, and tireless.  We took one side trip, a two-night stay in Assisi in the best room in the best hotel in town.  It was amazing what was possible once winter set in and the tourists were in a holding pattern until the weather broke.  A couple of years later came three weeks in a rented car down the back of the boot, mostly in a region called Puglia, but also in Calabria, where we spent a full week on a working farm in a room that opened onto a lemon grove and had a Mediterranean beach across the street.  Our next three-week car trip was spent largely in a region called Basilicata, in a mountain town called Matera, where until the 1960s, when they were moved into low-income housing, the inhabitants lived mostly in caves, where we too stayed—but ours was an actual cave hotel with running water and a mini-bar.  Our next three-week car tour through Italy took us north to Milan, Parma, Ferrara, and Bologna.  And on the trip to Campobasso we would also return to the north of Italy to see Sienna and Verona.  There was another trip to southern Italy and Sicily.  Campobasso, although I had always been curious about it, had not until that time pressed heavily enough on my mind to seek it out.  Now at last I would pay my respects to my Cifelli grandfather.

What I discovered was that the Cifelli clan had not come from Campobasso at all, but from a very tiny nearby town called Castelpetroso, which has come over the last hundred years to be called the Abandoned City.  I believe now that when the original Cifellis had arrived in the United States, they said they were from Campobasso imagining that everyone here would know of the huge city that was in their area, and that no one would know the name of the tiny town they actually came from.  It makes sense, and I would probably have said the same thing, but the record did get a little murky as a result, and I did believe for most of my life that my roots were in Campobasso, not in Castelpetroso.  Campobasso was practically unknown to Italians; Castelpetroso was unknown to Campobassans.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

·          

            Getting to Campobasso wasn’t easy.  We had left Milan by car on a Wednesday and had arrived at Rimini on the Adriatic Coast early that afternoon.  We spent the afternoon exploring the seaside town and having dinner before heading south the next morning.  We took the local interstate, the A14 autostrada, down the stunningly beautiful coast, traveling mostly through the region called Abruzzo.  Campobasso, it turns out, is in the region of Italy called today Molise, which seceded from Abruzzo in 1963, so of course my grandfather, who arrived here in 1898, was from the region of Abruzzo.  Armed with our tourist maps of the region (not it should be noted, road maps) and a Hertz GPS that kept losing power and blacking out, we eventually reached the coastal area of Molise, where we needed to turn inland.  The people at Hertz in Milan did not give us a road map because we opted for the GPS instead, but when we turned inland and the GPS faded out, we had nothing but the tourism map (weak on road names and intersections) to help us along.  With the Adriatic on our left as we drove down the coast, we always had a sure sense of where we were, but when we turned sharply inland, it became difficult at best to keep on a line that we thought should get us to Campobasso.

            The highway to Campobasso turned out not to be a single highway at all, but a series of small roads and tiny paths at times that wound around mountains, climbed up them, and then virtually disappeared into driveways and cow crossings.  The GPS could be babied into part-time service now and then, but when operational, it too seemed lost or intent on taking us down even more remote roads than the bad maps did. 

 In the maze of back roads, Molise.

We got lost, circled around and around, went down roads that seemed unlikely to lead anywhere, lost track of where the main “highway” was, and were close to despair when we hit a paved road with a sign that said Campobasso and an arrow pointing east.  Good grief—I didn’t think it was possible to feel so good about stumbling on a signpost. 

            But when we actually got into Campobasso, relieved beyond measure to have actually found it, we were immediately sucked into heavy traffic on roads that seemed to circle around on each other.  It was impossible to know what lane to be in, where to turn, or how exactly to get to the address of the Cascina Garden Hotel.  This was nearly as frustrating as circling through the back roads of Molise earlier.  But again, we finally prevailed and got to the hotel—a mere two hours late.  Predictably the English of the desk clerks was poor, always a test for my brushed-up Italian that barely gets us through airports, restaurants, and hotels.  And after the long and harrowing ride to Campobasso, my limited Italian was closed down for the day; all I wanted was comfort food and a lot of sleep.  The woman at the desk helped us as well as she could and then walked us over to the elevator with a sign that suggests the communications problem we were facing:

 Elevator sign at Cascina Garden Hotel in Campobasso

After unpacking and washing up, we were back on the highway, this time with directions of a sort from the desk clerk, to bring us back into town, where we eventually found a neighborhood restaurant called La Vecchia Cucina, The Old Kitchen, which was on Via Garibaldi, one of the bigger streets running through the capital.  We had a lovely young waitress who was working her way through the local college by waiting tables at night, and she treated us like foreign nobility.  We followed all her recommendations:  the house white and red wines; bruschetta, salad, a pasta and baccala dish, and a plate of grilled meats—veal, lamb, beef, and pork.  

The dining room at La Vecchia Cucina in Campobasso.

The waitress took our picture.

It was perfect, an excellent, relaxing end to a difficult travel day.  We got back to the hotel late in the evening and almost immediately collapsed into sleep. 

We needed our strength because the next day we would be searching for the tiny town of Castelpetroso, so small after all that it didn’t even make an appearance on the local maps we got from the desk clerk, who had lived in the area all her life and wasn’t quite sure she had ever heard of it.  So another adventure was awaiting us—but this one would turn out to be one of the most improbable and memorable travel days we had ever had.  Much better than I had even fantasized it might be. 

·         A knocked-over sign pointing the way was useless,

but we knew we were getting close.

            We were out of the room by 9:00 on Thursday morning.  The desk clerk on the early shift had indeed heard of Castelpetroso and said she knew how to get there, and so we had her directions to go by, but she was vague about distances and where to turn.  Still it was better than nothing, and we did have a set of Google maps we had downloaded from home, plus the Hertz GPS that kept going on and going off—and eventually getting us lost.  It wasn’t much to go on, but we had managed to find Campobasso against similar odds the day before, and this morning we had the benefit of a full night’s sleep to draw on.  We were ready.

            We needn’t have worried, however, because the desk clerk’s directions to Castelpetroso were good enough and we drove into the little town at 9:45 of a bright weekday, a time when I thought we would see some signs of small-town life, like women shopping or sweeping porches, maybe a business or two with workers visible.  Maybe a road crew leaning on shovels.  Maybe old men talking or children playing.  Nothing was going on.  It was a ghost town.  In the middle of the main street, a dog slept quietly, undisturbed even by the sound of our car as we pulled head first into a parking space very near where he was sunning himself and napping.

A dog at rest on the main street of Castelpetroso at

quarter to ten on a Thursday morning.

A boarded-up business on the main drag of Castelpetroso.

We walked down the closest street and found no one stirring, the only business being a boarded up restaurant.  Eventually an old man walked out of a building, clearly curious about the strangers walking aimlessly down his street.  We talked a little and he perked up when I told him my grandfather had been born here.  What was his name?  When did he leave?  When I told him it was about 1900, the old man’s eyes widened, then rolled, before he turned his hands up to show the hopelessness of any further conversation along these lines.  He’d been hoping he could say that he knew the man, that he was from thus and thus a place, and that there were still plenty of family members he could introduce me to.  I thanked him and we walked on.

 I spoke to an old man, dimly visible behind the gate

before he stepped out to speak to me.

            The town is steeply slanted and we climbed our way past a few feral cats and many stone buildings as we worked our way to the railed top of the road which looked out on the Apennines.   It was stunningly, sweepingly beautiful and I realized for the first time that there must have been a severe economic crisis here toward the middle of the 19^th century, something so threatening to the lifeblood of the  3,000 people who lived here that they were driven to leave.  Everyone who left must have been deeply torn, not just to leave family and friends, but mostly to leave this beautifully located little town.  Only the most dire of circumstances could account for this becoming the Abandoned City.

 Bobbi at the top of Castelpetroso.

 The majestic Apennines rising up behind me.

 It is hard to believe my grandfather and hundreds like him

abandoned this part of Italy in favor of Newark, NJ.

            As we moved along to another street, this one a narrow, winding, cobbled street, we stopped in front of a World War I memorial plaque adorned with fresh flowers and the names of the local boys who had died in the war.  

 World War I plaque commemorating the local boys

who had died in the war, including eight Cifellis.

Close up of the Cifellis.

There were eight Cifellis listed there.  I have stopped to look at scores of similar plaques throughout Europe, always interested in an abstract way at the memorials, but for the first time ever, I paused because every one of these men must have been related to me.  It was a sobering, staggering thought.  The plaque was up too high for me to reach, but I wanted to touch it and try to make out all the names that time has begun to erase. 

            We wandered through the beautiful stone streets and buildings, never seeing another person for half an hour.  We were clearly in the Abandoned City, and it was eerie walking by ourselves through street after street.  It had the feel of a Doomsday movie, what this place might look like after the Apocalypse.

 Castelpetroso, the Abandoned City

 The eerie absence of life.

But just when the silence became most oppressive, a woman approached us, breaking my train of thought and feeling.  She asked if perhaps we might like to see the church.  I hadn’t thought much about this neighborhood having a working church since she was only the second person we had seen.  The church was locked, she said, but she had seen us walking along and alone, and wondered if perhaps we might like to see the inside, which, as it happened, she had the keys to.  

 The bell tower and clock of San Martino’s Church, Castelpetroso.

 The altar of San Martino’s.

 The bronze doors (1983) of San Martino’s.

And so she led us around the corner to the entrance of the church she called San Martino’s, which gave me a start because that was my grandfather’s name and my own middle name.  I was distantly but directly connected to this church, and I felt a cold shiver go through me when I walked through the front doors.  I was 69 years old,  but until very recently I hadn’t even known Castelpetroso existed, and now I was learning that my grandfather and I were named for the patron saint of the community and its church.  My pulse raced to keep up with my thoughts and feelings. 

            The church itself was beside the point, however, though it was beautiful in the same way Italian churches throughout the country are beautiful:  sculpted images of the holy family, an altar that seemed more in use than on display, pews ready to receive worshippers, and so on.  The entrance, however, was unusual, a tall pair of bronze doors that had been installed recently, 1983, very busy with holy scenes and in what the lady said was a very appropriate form to match the 18^th Century church itself.  That is, if I understood the lady’s Italian correctly.  And I may well not have.  I remember thinking it odd that someone paid to commission the doors to a church in an abandoned city.  That doesn’t make sense.   And for all its abandonment, the streets were clean swept.  Who did the sweeping?  Who paid for it to be done?  And why? 

The old lady was very interested that I am a Cifelli, and she assured me that there were still many Cifellis in Castelpetroso, even though the place looked to be totally abandoned.  And then she asked if we had been to Guasto, because that’s where there were even more Cifellis than here in Castelpetroso.  I wasn’t sure I heard her right.  Even more Cifellis?  According to what I had learned about Castelpetroso, every Cifelli in the world could trace his lineage back here, and now I was learning that there might even be more of us tucked away in this little town called Guasto.  Maybe, I recall adding up the numbers, everyone had abandoned Castelpetroso and relocated in nearby Guasto.  Not that that made any sense.  Why wouldn’t they have just stayed where they were?  And clearly there had also been a great exodus of Cifellis to the United States.

Well, it was not even noon when we learned of Guasto (the old lady had virtually no idea how to get there—we might as well have asked her how to get to Rome), so Bobbi and I got back into the car, careful not to disturb the dog who had moved to a different part of the street to resume his rest, and we headed down the hill to the main road that had taken us to Castelpetroso.  We knew that we had passed a signpost for Guasto along the way, with one arrow pointing toward Castelpetroso and another toward Guasto.  We were in the middle of something here, but it wasn’t quite clear what it was. 

Among our Google papers was a sheet giving the longitude and latitude of an actual place in the area called Cifelli.  I had never before been tempted to believe Google could be wrong, but this sounded more than a little improbable.  I had never heard of such a place, not even from the old Cifellis who used to talk of Campobasso as the international Cifelli headquarters.  “Yeah,” one second cousin told me with a huge smile, “when you get off the train, you’ll know you’re home because all the men will be short with big bellies and a hooked nose!”  He thought this was a great joke and laughed for two minutes.  But even he had never mentioned a place called Cifelli.  Google, I was sure, had been wrong this time. 

We took the main road looking for Cifelli signposts, but there wasn’t one.  We drove all the way to Isernia, the other big city in the region, without any luck.  We stopped there, had coffee, and decided to retrace our steps to find the sign to Guasto.  And the Google information showed that Cifelli was near Guasto, so maybe we would have some luck with Cifelli if we could find Guasto.  It was a plan.  And it wasn’t long before we found the sign to Guasto and followed it into town, which turned out to be more of a one-horse town that did not promise very much.  The main street wound its way up yet another hill, going past a fork in the road, and eventually petered out to a gravel path at the far end.  I turned the car around and headed back thinking that Guasto was just as small as Castelpetroso without having any of its beauty.  This search had come to a dead end.

            As we drove slowly back down the hill, I saw a man working a hoe in the garden behind his house.  I parked the car and asked him for help.  Did he know of any Cifellis in the area?  Again my Italian wasn’t quite good enough to follow his answer, but he continued to speak and smile and eventually he gave me a hand signal to follow him.  We walked three houses back up the street, and the old man walked up the steps to the front door and began knocking and calling out “Maglio!  Maglio!”  By now I had deduced that this Maglio was a Cifelli, but as luck would have it, neither he nor his son was at home.

            The old man and I were going over the state of affairs in the driveway, about to part with many thanks and all best wishes being shouted back and forth, when a small yellow school bus passed in front of the house and out walked Maglio and his son, two of the most disreputable characters we had ever laid eyes on.  Neither had bathed in a month, both had a week’s stubble on his face, and their clothes were filthy.  They were carrying grocery bags.  As they were descending the steps of the bus, I had a thought.  I called out to the driver if he knew of a place nearby called Cifelli.  Not only did he know the place, but he responded in good English that if we waited ten minutes he would return and show us the way.  I could hardly believe my ears, but all I could think of was how on earth were we to spend ten whole minutes in the smelly company of Maglio Cifelli and his son?  He had no English at all and my Italian was worth almost nothing with this man, but somehow I managed to make enough small talk for ten minutes to pass by—and suddenly the bus driver was back, with his car, which he had exchanged for the bus.

            We said our goodbyes to Maglio and son and the old man who had walked us up the hill, and followed behind the bus driver, whose name was Carmelo. We had found Castelpetroso and Guasto—and were actually headed to Cifelli.  Which we reached in about two minutes.  We had actually driven through it on the way up the hill.  Carmelo turned right and drove down about three short streets then turned into a piazza.  

 Carmelo and I in front of the Cifelli bakery.

 The view from the Piazza di Cifelli.

We all piled out of our cars and he proudly announced that this was it.  Cifelli turned out to be about a four-block square of streets within Guasto—or that’s what it now appears to me to have been.  I don’t know if it is actually its own town, as Google and Carmelo seemed to believe, or if it has the same relationship to Guasto that say Greenwich Village has to New York.

            The piazza in Cifelli had a single focal point, a building formerly owned by one Rafaele Cifelli, whose monogram and coat of arms are etched into stone. 

 Rafaele Cifelli

There is also a single business in the piazza, a bakery selling breads and desserts.  Carmelo took us into the store to meet the woman and her husband Roberto who owned it; she had lived in the United States and spoke English very well we were told, but she was gone for the day so we spoke to Roberto for a while.  

 Roberto in front of his bread store.

When Carmelo introduced us to Roberto, he said hello and asked if we were from New Jersey?  I was amazed at the question, which seemed too far out of the blue to have any ready explanation, but he explained it was not very uncommon at all for local residents to go to New Jersey—as his own wife had done—and oftentimes to return again.  Furthermore, there is a connection of sorts between Guasto and nearby Castelpetroso, he went on, so that a person from one place is also from the other, perhaps in the sense that all Cifellis may once have come from Castelpetroso before relocating a few miles away to Guasto and then a few thousand miles away to New Jersey.  I was learning about my grandfather and about myself, and I had goose bumps.  I was actually visiting the places my grandfather Martino had lived in and walked through between about 1875 to 1895, when he joined the exodus and immigrated to Newark, NJ.

Just when it seemed we had exhausted our conversation possibilities, a woman pulled into the piazza and headed to the bread store.  She, as it happened, was a Cifelli, married now to a local man and living with him and their children on a nearby farm.  Her name was Fernanda Cifelli; we didn’t get her new last name because in the flurry of words that were flying around in Italian and English, her identity as a Cifelli was all that counted.  She was somewhere between 40 and 50, and spoke perfect English because she had lived for ten years  in Philadelphia with her parents and nine brothers and sisters.  On a family visit back to Guasto, she met the man who would become her husband and then stayed behind with him when the rest of her family returned to Philadelphia.  She had been making ricotta cheese and provolone that day and had driven into town to buy bread for sandwiches.  She was absolutely lovely and talked with us for half an hour, sounding so South Philly and being at the same time so Guasto-Cifelli.  Her entire family moved from Philadelphia to New Jersey a few years later, which somehow seemed perfect to me, bringing this strange story of Campobasso, Castelpetroso, Guasto, and New Jersey into the sort of focus it had never before had for me.  

This had been no ordinary travel day.  Fernanda Cifelli was a living representative of the 150-year- old relationship linking all these places, and she made me feel part of a process that not only connected her to me in an odd sort of way, but more importantly that connected me to my past.  I have more questions about my ancestry and my relatives, but being able to place myself back where it all began has put me into a historical movement and given me a way to know my grandfather, my father, and myself.  Uncovering these relationships in place and time and blood, all in one single day, and then being able to shine a new light on my ancestry—and my children’s and their children’s—seems to me like a miracle.  Finding Campobasso had been a once-in-a-lifetime day of self-discovery.  And I’m forever grateful to have had it.