Chapter 33: "Is This What You Call an Epiphany?"

It happened shortly after my arrival in Naples, on what at first seemed to be quite an ordinary day. Looking back, though, I hold the scene in my mind in a kind of golden glow. And it isn't just because I met Filomena in the Piazza, and a fellow she brought along. Of course I didn't know what exactly was in store. And truly how do we ever know what's in store? Or what is still to come in some other life?

Start over. Begin by describing what the sky looked like on that momentous afternoon. There were just a few clouds, thin wisps of pink and orange.

I took a photo, I wanted so much to capture the way the sky looked, as I waited for the tour guide to arrive. But as I look at the photo now, I realize that it didn't capture the sky at all. This is one time that I simply must rely on memory to conjure up the sky. Or perhaps I can paint the sky the next time I set up my easel and face a blank canvas.

The tour guide's name was Michaela, and we had arranged to meet at the corner, adjacent to the Gran Cambrinus. I left my B&B up on the hill about 1:15, locking the gigantic wooden door and heading downhill, enjoying all the architecture, the gardens. The occasional cactus. I got excited when I glimpsed the blue bay in the distance.

Once I was in the Piazza, I enjoyed looking at the crowds, and the sky. I was early so I wandered. I found another bakery, very modest, around the corner from Cambrinus, where the array of cookies was especially pleasing. I bought a small selection and ate one that had thin layers of chocolate.

It was now 2:00 pm. I stood beside the potted trees of Cambrinus and scanned the crowd. And there he was, wearing the official tour guide badge on a blue ribbon around his neck.

"Signora Ricci?" He smiled, a pleasant-looking man with a wide smile. We shook hands. Right away, he noticed my bag of cookies and complimented me on finding an alternative to Cambrinus. "We who live here know Cambrinus is 'una trappola per turisti!'" he said, charging exorbitant prices for espresso drinks and confections. I agreed, but I didn't tell him that I will always hold Gran Cambrinus very close to my heart because that's where I first encountered Filomena.

We started the tour standing in the center of the mammoth Piazza. He pointed over toward a hill away from the Bay. He took me back to the eighth century BC, when the Greeks planted their first city settlement, or polis, on that distant hill. Two hundred years later, the Greeks moved to the "new" polis, the new city of Neapolis.

"Naples, older than Rome," he said, "one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world."

As he spoke about the huge influence that the Greeks played in Naples, and in the rest of southern Italy, I remembered something: a few years ago when my sister paid $100 so I would agree to do Ancestry.com, the results showed that in addition to DNA from southern Italy, I had Greek DNA. At the time, that was rather puzzling. Now I see why.

"How could I not know the history of southern Italy?" I was thinking that, but meanwhile, I realized that Michaela was asking me a question. "Oh, my ancestors? All of them are Italian," I say. "But the one that I am writing about was from Paola." His eyes widened. "Paola?" He pointed at a huge curved building with pillars.

"My dear Signora," he said, "then you must have visited the great Basilica di Francesco di Paola." Immediately I was embarrassed because I didn't even know the grand church was there. Nor did I realize how important a saint Francesco di Paola was, or that he resided in a monastery here in the 16th century.

"Well you see I have not yet visited Paola, but I plan on doing it. Soon." I tried to explain why I hadn't been there yet, because I've been so smitten by Naples, but it doesn't sound that convincing.

Thankfully, he turned back toward the Piazza and continued speaking, explaining that Naples was inhabited first by the Greeks, and then it became a major cultural center under the Romans. And from there, he pivoted slowly around the Piazza, taking me through a very compressed history of three other buildings, the Royal Palace of Naples, which housed the Bourbons, the Palazzo Salerno and, its mirror, the Prefecture Palace.

That's when he explained that Napoleon ruled over Naples, as did Charles III, king of Spain.

My head was beginning to spin with all of this information. And maybe that's why it hit me with such force, the realization that my ancestry is one of the richest in the world!

I opened my mouth to say something. I wanted to say that I was feeling a sense of pride the likes of which I had never felt before. It was actually a physical sensation, an energy or light rising out of my chest, filling the rest of me, and making me smile. I wanted to say out loud that I was feeling incredibly fortunate to be here, learning all of this history of my ancestors. I was feeling such intense love for them. But before I could get the words out, I blinked because, right next to Michaela's left shoulder stood Filomena. And beside her was a very tall bearded man, whose very serious face was rather familiar.

Michaela kept talking. Evidently, he didn't see these two people.

"Excuse me Michaela," I said, wondering how I would explain why I had interrupted him. But I needn't have worried about that because Michaela had just evaporated.

Filomena spoke. "It be so nice for me to see you here again," she said. I nodded, my head swimming. She gestured to the dark-eyed young man, who had a mustache that draped long on either side. "Of course I thought you are so happy too that you can finally meet him, your great grandfather." There I stood staring at none other than my bisnonno, Pasquale Orzo.

Here was the person whose birth my book had been slowly working up to. I brought both hands to cover my heart. I was tongue-tied. I didn't know where to start.

"I...I am so...so grateful to meet you," I said finally. He nodded. But he didn't smile. Instantly, I recalled my grandmother Albina telling me years and years ago that her father had a fierce temper.

"He knows no English," Filomena said. I was going to ask her why that was, since here she was speaking English. How come he didn't know the language? But Filomena was saying something else to me.

"We must hurry," she said. "He is on his way to the ship," a word that came out sounding like "sheep." I glanced at Pasquale; he carried a suitcase in one hand and under his other arm was a large white bundle, tied with rope.

"Where is he going?"

"Where else?" Filomena said. "To New York!" She smiled. Yes, of course I thought, like millions of other Italian immigrants. "Per favore, walk with us to la porta. He is sailing today!"

"Oh. What a privilege that would be, to see him off," I said.

As we crossed the Piazza, heading toward the water, Filomena explained to me that Pasquale had taken a long train ride from Paola to come to Naples, a trip that took most of one day.

We had reached the wharf, and there, filling the harbor were dozens of wooden sailboats with towering masts. None of them looked large enough to ply the Atlantic Ocean.

"Are these boats that sail to the United States?" I was incredulous.

Filomena chuckled. "Si, si, of course. You see that one where so many people have gathered? That is the boat called the Weser that my son and his best friend, Salvatore Sessa, Nunzi's son, are sailing, on their first trip to the US." Trip sounded like "treep." I recalled something that my cousin Donna had learned as she researched the lives of our Orzo ancestor. Pasquale crossed the ocean three or four times! He made his first trip in 1894. The Weser was both a sailboat and it also had a steam engine. But it was cheaper to sail, so that's how the boat moved most of the time, with its sails billowed.

I closed my eyes. I am easily given to nausea and seasickness. The thought of sailing nearly more than 4600 nautical miles across the Atlantic on that sailboat was way more than I could imagine. I wanted to say something to Pasquale. To commend him for his courage. Or to wish him a bon voyage at least. But he had already joined a throng of several hundred people

waiting to board the ship. Many of the women had their heads covered with scarves. The men wore hats. And that bundle my great grandfather carried? So many others had their own white bundles tied with rope too.

I took in a long breath, watching as more and more people gathered in front of the ship. "How many people can fit on that boat?" I asked it, thinking Filomena wouldn't know. But somehow she did.

"Almost 900," she said.

I shook my head. It would take several million dollars to make me step foot on that boat. And then I realized, there wasn't money enough to get me to do it. I had all I could do to fly to Italy in a few hours overnight, on a jet.

Then something else hit me: what will these people eat on board? I doubt there were gourmet meals, or even, any fresh produce. And once Pasquale arrived in Ellis Island, what was he facing? There wouldn't be anyone there waiting to take him to a comfortable hotel or someone's home. Who knows how long before he was settled!

"I am humbled." I murmur this to Filomena. "I never thought about it before, but I am so deeply impressed, and more grateful than I can say, that my ancestors made their way to the US. It wasn't easy to be an immigrant."

I turned. Filomena had disappeared. Here instead was Michaela. Evidently he had heard what I had just said, though, because now he was responding. "Si, si, that is true but you realize that maybe they would love to stay here but so many people in those days were so poor...they went to America because they were starving."

The words "grinding poverty" come to mind. I had read that term, referring to the millions of southern Italians who immigrated to the US, I had read it somewhere as I was preparing to write my book. Now I was beginning to see just how desperate my ancestors were.

"Before we leave the Piazza, I want you to know how that it got its name Plebiscito. It was named after the plebiscite, or vote, on October 21, 1860, the one that unified all of Italy into one kingdom. This we refer to as Risorgimento, so important an event for us."

I nodded. Honestly, though, I was very distracted. My head was still back with Pasquale, as he was getting ready to board the Weser. I wanted to say something else to Michaela. I wanted to say that before today, I hadn't really thought about the fact that my own parents never traveled to Italy. They never had the chance to stand here in the Piazza Plebiscito in Naples, realizing what an incredibly rich history our people had. Instead, my parents grew up in families of very modest means, feeling somewhat ashamed being Italian. In a real sense, they passed along a kind of low self-esteem to me. A feeling that I had to make up for being a "lowly" immigrant.

I can't count the number of times that my mother, who was born in the blueblood town of Simsbury, Connecticut (where my grandfather worked at the fuse factory, Ensign Bickford and Sons), said that she, the only Italian, was constantly paired in school with the only black girl in the class.

Growing up as an Italian American had been challenging. I still recoil whenever I hear -- or recall hearing -- the term "dirty Italians."

And then suddenly I have this deep insight, a realization I have never had about myself: I grew up in reaction to this familial low self-esteem. I have always been an overachiever. In school, I was always at the very top of my class. I participated in every possible extra-curricular activity in high school. Senior year, I was voted Most Likely to Succeed. I won an academic scholarship to an Ivy League college. After earning a Master's degree in Journalism from UC Berkeley, I became a reporter for a large Chicago newspaper, eventually working for The Wall Street Journal in New York. All of this by the time I was 28 years old.

Oh and then I got a PhD in English during my forties. Fortunately, by that point, I actually started to do things that I loved. Like write fiction. My first novel served as the creative dissertation for my doctorate. And not long after that, I began painting, an activity that I simply adore.

Looking back I realize that I spent the first four decades of my life building a resume! How sad to think that what drove me, largely, was a deeply embedded fear that we, my immigrant family, were just not good enough. How wonderful, though, that writing, and specifically, writing about Filomena, has brought me here to southern Italy, to the Piazza, to a new realization about myself and my ancestry. I don't ever have to worry about not being good enough anymore!

I smiled. Oh my, I felt so happy. I honestly felt...giddy!

I thought about Filomena. I am so grateful. Because finding her has enabled me to find...ME. Me in a new form.

I wanted to tell someone. But there was no one to tell. Because Michaela was leading the way out of the Piazza now, taking me toward what looked to be a giant castle sitting right on the bay. A castle with a moat!

As I trailed him, I felt an elation that I can't describe in words. What was needed, I decided, was a full orchestra playing something monumental.

Oh my heavens, what a day!