My grandparents, as far as I know, made one long journey during their lives, from Fontegreca, Italy, to Lawrence, Mass. The weeks over land and then across the Atlantic by ship divided their world into before and after - had they returned to their village in Campania, they likely would have been known as “Americani,’’ the sheer fact of their crossing having changed them forever.
How much their journey was one from which they could never fully return, I only gleaned long after they both were gone, when I visited the Italian village where my great aunt - who’d never made the crossing - lived. The distinction between her world and even the Florence I’d been inhabiting for weeks has stayed with me over the years: I apprehended it on the road to the village as our car zipped past hunched old women headed there, too, weighted with bundles of twigs for their hearths. Once in my great aunt’s two-room home, I couldn’t stop wondering at the frugality of her March fire - as a child of New England I’d never seen anything like it - for it never grew to more than a modest heap of glowing embers. One scavenged log protruded from the hearth, and now and again she nudged it further into the embers to keep the fire going.
