Italy, Part 1: Naples

Walking in my Grandfather’s Footsteps

I have one thing to say to my grandfather, Domenico Troisi: Thank you so much for leaving Naples!

A few hours spent around Via Cesare Rossaroll in Naples, Italy, where Domenic lived as a child before immigrating to the United States in 1907, has made me eternally grateful that he came to the United States. This impoverished, filthy, decaying pesthole of a neighborhood, teeming with loud people and louder cars, narrow streets and narrower alleys, ancient buildings with paint peeling off, blowing litter and dog shit everywhere, is beyond depressing.

And this godforsaken alley is where my grandfather lived with his father and two brothers, first in a dingy flat with a shared toilet outside in the hall, and later in a small room separated by a curtain from his father’s “magazino,” or tailoring shop and store combined.
The Memory Book

Domenic described this neighborhood in his 50th Anniversary Memory Book, published in 1970. But his optimistic style does not capture the over-stimulating, exhausting reality of his Neapolitan living situation. Fortunately, my cousin Janice Carapellucci and sister Julie Holm both spent considerable hours and effort researching and digging to locate the home where he lived and the chapels and other landmarks he referenced in his memoir, so that a small group of Troisi cousins could make a pilgrimage to Italy and back to the place from whence we came.

Naples

I’ll be blunt: Naples is no tourist town. It’s working-class, gritty, loud and obnoxious. It reminds me of some parts of NYC and helps me understand how the Big Apple, with so many Italian immigrants, came to develop some of its pushy, in-your-face character. Walking from the train station this morning, first I was hit by multiple flailing elbows while walking the few blocks to get there, then I was almost deafened by a whole line of cars leaning on their horns to express their outrage at some poor sap holding up the line in front of them. This could have happened just as easily on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Life off Via Cesar Rosaroll

But back to Domenic. First, his family lived, as his brother D. Paul described in the memoir, in a small apartment: “Our apartment was called a flat, with community toilet out in the hall; the central heating consisted of our cooking stove in which we burned charcoal when we could afford it. We scavenged kindling at the curb market where we picked up discarded boxes and crates.”
Domenic’s alley

After his mother died in 1906, this Spartan lifestyle deteriorated, according to Domenic: “My father gave up the apartment and put what furniture he could salvage (in) back of the store, dividing the room with a curtain across the entire width. He felt that by so doing he could take better care of his three boys. Many of the meals consisted of pans of spaghetti, or paste e faggioli, which were supplied by a restaurant in Porta Capuana in exchange for tailoring and clothes my father made for the family of the restaurant owner. I cooked most of the meals on a small kerosene stove in back of the store.” 

He was only 12.

Transported Back in Time

Walking in the neighborhood where Domenic spent his childhood, I felt transported back in time 110 years. It seems like nothing has changed, except that there are cars and motorbikes clogging the streets now instead of horses and carriages and pushcarts.

Domenic’s door

People still live in the same squalid conditions, with the addition of indoor plumbing. Clotheslines with sheets, socks and pants still flutter in the wind from balconies above the alleyways. Homemade Roman Catholic shrines to the Virgin Mary and assorted saints can be found in every alcove, with some large ones dominating street corners, festooned with plastic flowers and Holy Water, better maintained than any of the nearby homes. People still live their lives in public with their doors wide open. You can look in as you walk by and see an extended family sharing one small, dark living space, a small kitchen behind, people hanging outside the door, smoking.

The whole place probably smells better, thanks to modern plumbing and the absence of horse manure in the streets (although there was plenty of dog poop). Otherwise, it’s largely unchanged.

Where We Came From and What It Means

Seeing where you came from can make you even more grateful about where you are now. In the decision by Domenic’s father, Beniamino, to board the Steamship Bulgaria, we dodged a bullet. No wonder a squalid tenement on the Upper East Side, where Domenic, his father and two brothers lived with his uncle’s family after they arrived in New York in 1907, “was almost a luxury for us.”

Domenic, Donato and Dante (L-R)

No wonder Domenic was so driven to get ahead, to get educated, to learn English, to improve his living situations, to build that glorious house on Vernon Avenue in Williamsport, PA, where my mother and her nine brothers and sisters grew up.

Walking in Domenic’s footsteps was physically draining and emotionally exhausting. I’m glad I did it. And I am really, really glad he left. 
Grazie, Nonno.

London, Part 3: Running & Other Activities

Running in Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park


The most wonderful surprise for Bob and me was the quality of the running in London. Truly magnificent! Kensington Gardens was a block and a half away from the flat we rented, and it is glorious. We were running along, talking about how it reminded us of Central Park, when we realized we were in the back yard of the Royal residences, separated by just a polo field. We speculated about which “cottage” (really, mansions) belonged to Wills and Kate, and which housed Harry and Meghan. Next thing you knew we were at Kensington Palace! Its gardens were beautful and it is actually open to visitors, though we never got there to see the Princess Diana Fashion Exhibit. 

We discovered Round Pond on one run, the Serpentine on another, the Princess Diana Memorial on another, and green parakeets that let people feed them out of their hands on another. The morning dew made the park glow eerily. 
Kensington Palace

And right beside Kensington Gardens was Hyde Park, not quite as Frederick Olmstead-like, but still large and lovely, with a huge grassy green in the center which doubtless hosts loads of picnickers and probably outdoor concerts in the summertime.

We agreed we would probably get in fantastic running shape if we lived in London, as Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park are only one example of London’s abundance of green spaces.

Other Highlights

Other highlights of our days in London included:
38,000-pound silverplate set at Harrods
Metal art at the V&A
  • We visited the Church of St. Martin in the Fields, near Leicester Square, where we attended a Mozart concert in the evening in tribute to my parents, who when they lived outside of London in the late 1980s used to attend classical concerts there.
  • We discovered the London Film Festival was going on and went to see the hysterically funny documentary “I Used to be Normal: A Boy Band Fangirl Story,” in a far-flung London neighborhood (ethnic, not touristy, sort of Queens-like) after an unusual and unexpectedly delicious meal at a Turkish restaurant.
  • We visited the Victoria and Albert Museum, aka the V&A, which focuses on design and saw a new history of photography exhibition that had been dedicated by Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge  (just Kate to us commoners), just a few days before. I loved the museum’s display of metal art, and we mostly passed on the paintings of dead people.
  • We spent a couple of hours in the world-famous, over-the-top luxurious Harrods’s Department store, where we perused 2000-pound ($2,600 US) coffeemakers, 38,000-pound ($50,000) silver-plate cutlery sets, 3050-pound ($4000) purses, swords, wine glasses (some only 45 pounds each – $$60) and so much more, each item more decadent, expensive and unnecessary than the next. We bought nothing but bought picnic food in the surprisingly reasonable little deli in the chocolate section and picnicked out in a courtyard by the Tube station.
  • On our last day, we visited the Tower of London, enjoying a tour by a very British Yeoman something-or-other, taking in the Crown Jewels, watching a video of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953 (poor girl looked terrified, in my opinion), and seeing the extreme excess and ostentatiousness of the soup tureens and salt containers for royal banquets hundreds of years past. We learned about the checkered and grisly past of the royal family, especially Henry IIX, and wondered if Meghan knows what she got herself into.
    Our guide
A beheading about to happen at the Tower of London
And now … goodbye London, off to Italy!

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