Ancestors Are Whispering in My Ears, Telling the Story of the Two Dante Antonios

As hard as it is to believe, I am now beginning to understand that I may be writing another novel, another tale about another ancestor, this one on my mom's side of the family. This realization comes after I swore to my dear massage therapist Sarah Williams last fall that I might very well never write another novel again.

I am doing this when I haven't even picked up the paperback version of my fifth novel, "Finding Filomena." That happens tomorrow, August 1, 2025, when my husband and I drive an hour to The Troy Bookmakers to pick up the boxes. Am I excited, oh yes.

Anyway, if I didn't know better -- that is, if I didn't know very very well that it oftentimes takes hundreds, and even THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of pages of writing before a novelist even knows what chapter goes first -- then I might be willing to call what follows

CHAPTER TWO, "Angels (or Ancestors?) Keep Whispering in My Ears."

I am not more than four years old the first time I follow my Grandma Mish, short for Michelina (my mother’s mother) into her bedroom. She lifts the oval photo off the wall. She shines the glass with the bottom of her cotton apron.

Mish was, temperamentally, as soft and gentle as her pillowy lap.

I lived with my Grandma Mish and Grandpa Claude (“Pop” to everyone who knew him)

Grandma Mish lived until age 95, long enough to know my three beautiful children.

when I was a brand-new infant, while my Dad was finishing building -- with his own two hands -- our first house, in Bristol, Connecticut, and then again when Dad was away at IBM's computer school. Mom and me, and my brother Richie and my baby sister Karen stayed in Canton, CT -- about a half hour's drive from Bristol -- for what seemed like forever.

Anyway, in Grandma’s sweet bedroom, there is, hanging on the wall, an oval frame and

inside this frame is a baby. But this is not a baby, this creature inside the frame. He looks to be more like a doll, or better yet, a saint. In my first recollection, I remember him being all powder blue and yellow and glowing in the photo like an angel, at least the way I imagine angels being.

Grandma Mish is slowly polishing this precious photo of her first baby. But wait, when my cousin sends me the photo of the baby last week, I realize that my memory bank is all wrong.

He is cherubic, much like my grandson Monte (Italian for mountain), but this other long ago baby sits inside a gloomy background. Dark, just like his story.

He is Dante Antonio Rotondo. The first Dante Antonio Rotondo.

Is he a ghost? Who am I to say? Lately, I have begun to believe in ghosts, even though I never actually see them. Or do I?

But I know for a fact that this baby did haunt the life of the second Dante Antonio, my mother’s oldest brother, all of his life. My Uncle Dante was a giant of a man, like his brothers, over six feet tall. And handsome

as a movie star!

It is for my beloved uncle that my oldest grandson, Ronen Dante, 11 years old, is named.

What I remember best about Uncle Dante is his scissoring sense of humor. And his superb ability to make the best wisecracks.

I can still recall him telling all kinds of funny stories, many of which he shared as he sat sandwiched into the corner of Grandma Mish and Pop’s couch. Uncle Dan was such a great great storyteller, and jokester, that it should come as no surprise that his children, my beloved first cousins, whip out funny stories at dizzying speed. They are really really funny stories. Oh, and it also helps that their mother, my aunt who is 97 years young, and the last of my parents’ generation, has a crackling sense of humor too.

OK, back to Dante Antonio the first. This is the story of the first Dante Antonio. And also, inevitably the second Dante — whose middle name was Americanized to Anthony. Dante was my mother’s oldest brother and he suffered dearly because of Dante Antonio.

********

You may be wondering how this story of the two Dante Antonio's connects to "The Story of Clementina," which I wrote and posted in Substack last month.

The simple answer is that this story has EVERYTHING to do with Bis Nonna (Great Grandma) Clementina's story. I suppose I should just tell you right now that it was because of Clementina that the first Dante Antonio died, at the excruciatingly tender age of eight months, all cherubic and fleshy, his cheeks brushed pink and constantly reminding me -- and perhaps scaring me too -- of the cheeks of my darling grandson Monte, who is two and a half years old but still highly cherubic. When her precious first baby died, Grandma Mish was still a new bride, only 20 years old.

What continues to amaze me, all these many decades later, is that looking back, when Grandma Mish used to sit on her bed and proudly show me her beloved first baby, she never once spoke a mean word about her mother. She never once even whispered words of sadness. I didn't know better then, but now, as the mother of three and the grandmother of three, I realize that Mish's restraint bordered on the miraculous.

Can I in my wildest imagination comprehend how Mish managed to keep mum about the fierce sadness that must have hummed in her heart?

Ah, but as time would tell, Grandma Michelina, for all her pillowy softness, had a core of the hardest steel, as was demonstrated six decades later when in the space of ten years, she lost two of her beloved adult sons, Delio, who held a doctorate in Math (he succumbed to Multiple Myeloma in 1980,) and Claude, Jr., "Sonny," who held a doctorate in engineering, and who died in 1990 of a massive heart attack.

Back to baby Dante Antonio.

Grandma Mish learned very very early in her extraordinary life as a mother (she had six more children after losing the first Dante) a fundamental lesson that THANKFULLY we modern mothers rarely have to learn:

that children are God Given and (God FORBID) God Taken Away. At any moment of any day, these precious offspring can be snatched away from us, even in their prime months of babyhood.

The Story of Clementina, o "La Storia de mi Bis Nonna!"

July 16, 2025 1:13 pm

I spoke to Sarah Williams a few minutes ago on the phone. Sarah, a massage therapist in Lenox, MA, who spent a year living in Florence during college, was the person I turned to last fall when it was time to let someone fluent in Italian read my new novel, Finding Filomena.

Finding Filomena tells the story of how my great great grandmother Filomena Scrivano gave birth to her son out of wedlock in 1870 in southern Italy.

Filomena Scrivano’s son, Pasquale Orzo, was my father’s grandfather.

Much of this new novel, I am only a little embarrassed to say, I wrote with the assistance of Google translator. I am not too embarrassed because I was so desperate to write this book about my ancestor, and I don’t -- yet -- have the capability of speaking and writing in Italian. Voglio parlare e scrivere en Italian ma…

I have felt an irrepressible need to speak and to write and to hear Italian spoken for about five years now, ever since the pandemic to be exact. But I was much too busy writing this new novel to enroll in language classes.

So I relied on Google, along with the patchwork of Italian I know from sitting at the dining room table in Canton, Connecticut and listening endlessly to my Mom converse with her mother, Grandma Michelina Caponi Rotondo, and her father, Claude “Pop” Rotondo. I eked out the Italian as best I could.

Sarah, who is a massage therapist, read Finding Filomena so carefully, she even edited some of the English, along with correcting the Italian. That's not surprising, considering the fact that she did after all attend Mount Holyoke College, majoring in Italian.

My mother, C. Dena Ricci, and me, Claudia Ricci, age three or four.

It was after I got off Sarah’s massage table last September that I handed her a box with a neat pile of paper, three inches high, which was the manuscript. I remember asking her why it doesn’t work to rely on Google translator to write a book. Her reply was simple.

“Well,” she said in her very patient and loving way. “People just don’t speak like that.”

It was also during that same massage last September that I first found myself verbalizing a horrifying story from my MOTHER’s side of the family. The story involves my mother’s grandmother, Clementina Ciucci.

I didn’t even realize I was telling the story until Sarah stopped rubbing my right arm with lavender-scented lotion and said, without the least bit of humor in her voice, “Claudia this is your next novel.”

At that moment I surfaced out of the massage-induced trance. I laughed, quite dismissively. “Oh Sarah, I haven’t even finished writing about Great Great Grandma Filomena Scrivano. Right now, I cannot imagine writing another novel. Maybe ever!”

*****

Mom was christened Clementina Dena Rotondo in March of 1926 and as she grew into adulthood, she realized how much she detested her first name. She hated it so much that she actually went to court sometime during the 1990s to have her name officially changed to C. Dena Ricci.

“I don’t want that awful name Clementina on my gravestone,” Mom said matter-of-factly. My mom was as gentle a soul as you will find, an angel really, except every now and then, she would get enraged and put her foot down about something.

She put her foot down on this matter of her headstone.

When I texted Sarah the other day, I told her I needed to speak to her right away. She told me she had some time this morning before noon. Almost as soon as we began speaking, I told her that my mom and dad, who were the wind in my sails, pushing me to write Finding Filomena, are now pushing me to write my mother’s namesake’s story.

Sarah was shocked. She hadn’t forgotten about the story that she unlocked from me last September, but she was surprised that after telling her I might never write another novel, I was now, ten months later, telling her that I had to write the book, as in, right away.

I told her I was feeling scared. I told her that I wrote Finding Filomena with my parents vaguely floating all around me. But now they were making themselves known in more direct ways. It was, in short, kind of spooking me out.

"Sarah, I don't feel ready to meet with dead people, even if those dead people happen to be my beloved parents."

She didn’t miss a beat. She spoke softly but firmly, the way she always speaks. “Just ask your mom and dad

My parents, Dena Rotondo Ricci and Richard Louis Ricci, at their engagement in 1949. Rose painting by Fawn Frome, my brother Ric Ricci's wife.

to approach you with caution when they appear. Just tell them to go slow,” Sarah said, her gentle voice pouring over me as if I am a baby and my mother is pouring over me my first warm bathwater. I closed my eyes while she spoke.

I felt myself calming down right away. I told her that the way I relax these days is by shutting off my phone, and sitting quietly, doing absolutely nothing at all.

Sometimes, I said, I stare out at the glorious meadow, and the dancing willow trees, or the dazzling flower gardens in a rainbow of colors. Sometimes I lay in the pool in a "dead woman’s float," going limp and looking up at the cloud patterns in the deep blue sky.

Sarah endorsed relaxation above all else. She strongly encouraged me to keep shutting off my phone, and my computer if necessary. “Just give in to relaxation,” she said. “Feel your body. Listen to your body.”

So I am now going to shut off my phone.

To breathe. And maybe, just maybe, a little later on today, I will go back into my study and just sit quietly at my desk. Or maybe I will kneel at my meditation table.

I will speak very carefully, very slowly to my mom and to my dad, whose extraordinary photos stare at me over my computer.

I will breathe in and out a few times, and I will ask Mom to tell me the story of Clementina.