When you travel you try to see beautiful and interesting things. Those will vary depending on how you define beautiful or interesting, but on our recent trip to Italy we did our best. We saw churches, ancient ruins and modern neighborhoods. We saw artwork from over two millennia of human history. We saw rivers and salt water, mountains and valleys. We ate well. Much of it was beautiful and all of it was interesting.
Sometimes on these trips you can sit with people and get a glimpse into their lives. Most people are friendly no matter where you go and you can discover a lot about a place if you are able to have a conversation with the people there. If you are lucky, perhaps you can catch up with a friend as well. But rarely as a visitor to another country do you find yourself welcomed by an entire community, taken in as a returning family member and made to feel at home in a place you’ve only been to once before for a single afternoon, and when that happens it is something to be remembered.
In the summer of 2024 we spent two days in Ruoti, the Italian hilltop town in Basilicata where my great-grandparents were born, and there we were greeted with warmth, folded into the events of the community, and sent away with memories and good wishes. We’d been there a year earlier, on a short side trip as we drove from Rome to Irsina. A friend had done some research and located the house where my great-grandmother was born over a century and a half ago. While there we met two friendly women sitting in front of their apartment building and this turned into a lively conversation that eventually pulled in their neighbors, two of whom spoke English and graciously gave us a thorough tour of the old part of town. Before we left they introduced us to Felice, who told us of the Émigré Festival he was arranging to celebrate the people who had migrated from Ruoti as well as their descendants. He invited us to return the following summer for it.
We ended up staying in Avigliano, the next town over, because the B&B in Ruoti was booked for the festival. Thanks to some questionable choices by Google Maps we were a few minutes late arriving in Ruoti for the mass that would start the day’s events but fortunately this was not a major issue as scheduled starting times in southern Italy seem to be viewed as goals rather than commitments and this worked in our favor.
La Chiesa Madre di San Nicola is a surprisingly pink church located close to the top of the mountain that Ruoti sits on, and it’s just lovely. We stood in front of the church for a bit as people slowly gathered, enjoying the displays of photographs for the Émigré Festival. The stage for that evening’s events was set up and ready to go.
After a while we were directed inside and there was a brief period of settling in as people found their places. There were about twenty or thirty people there, including three sets of descendants. The priest was a gentle old man who seemed rather bemused by the idea of celebrating mass with us – mostly non-Catholic and mostly not Italian speakers – but he did his best and at times we simply passed around our phones with the Google Translate app open so we could catch a bit of what he was saying. I was struck by the informality of it and the sense of welcome that came with that. It was a very nice thing to do for us, and we appreciated it.
After the mass we went back outside to the little piazza in front of the church where there was some time to talk with everyone. The plan, as we discovered, was that we would move on from there to lunch.
It was quite a lunch.
For one thing, there were about two hundred people there – a significant percentage of Ruoti’s population – and for another thing, it took about four hours and involved at least six different courses. One does not rush Sunday lunch in Italy. It is a serious and very tasty business. It started with an antipasto of locally made cured meats and buffalo mozzarella, and a potato and onion frittata. Then came a homemade pasta dish, a lamb stew of some kind, a fruit cup, and two different desserts. Each course was fairly small and spaced out so you never felt uncomfortable or too full for the next thing that arrived. There was water to drink – and if you finished yours, which I did several times on that hot day, you could just go over to the fountain and refill your bottle – and a keg of red wine on tap.
In between courses there were all sorts of activities. There was live music the whole time – a fascinating mix of traditional Italian folk music and modern pop tunes (and you haven’t really lived until you’ve sung Only Fools Rush In on a piazza in an Italian hilltop village, have you?) and with her hand-fan Kim befriended the saxophone player on a sun-bleached summer day. There was dancing of many kinds, from polkas to traditional Italian dances to a conga line led by the mayor. There were also games, all of which were conducted in Italian so I didn’t follow along very closely, though I was intrigued by the one that asked the townspeople to translate old-fashioned Ruotese dialect terms into modern Italian. Even they found it difficult.
Eventually lunch came to an end and my son and I went to the car so I could get my things for the evening’s events. On the way we stopped by my great-grandmother’s house just to see it again. There is a family living there now. We could hear them inside just going about their lives and there is something reassuring about this that is hard to specify but is there nonetheless.
The main event of the day as far as I was involved took place back at the piazza in front of La Chiesa Madre di San Nicolo. I knew that I would be giving a presentation – that’s why Felice had invited me to the festival, after all – but I hadn’t realized that I would be up on stage the whole time. I’d thought I’d walk up, do my thing, and then fade gently back into the audience, but in the end I was right there up front for much of the evening. It went surprisingly well. On one side of me was an anthropologist who spoke about immigration and tourism and how small towns like Ruoti could find ways to honor their past while still living in the present and preparing for their future, and on the other side was the mayor, a kind and gracious man who sat on my other side. We shared the stage with a chef who owns a restaurant in the Washington DC area and a man from Argentina, a fellow descendent. The mayor welcomed us all, and then the Traditional Folk Dancing Group came out and performed. They were fun to watch, and they returned many times during the evening.
While all this was going on there was a cooking demonstration offstage left, where a group of women were making pasta and then serving it in a fresh tomato sauce. At some point in the program there was a bit of an intermission so the speakers could leave the stage and go back to the audience and as I walked by one of the women handed me a bowl of pasta and even though the lunch had pretty much guaranteed that I would not be hungry until breakfast the next day I ate it anyway and it was marvelous.
The final performance of the evening – at least the final bit that we saw, since by the time it ended it was after 10pm and there was a whole concert yet to come but we were tired and needed to drive back in the dark to Avigliano – was a one-woman play about Cleope, the great-grandmother of one of the descendants there that day. It was interesting from a theater perspective. The actress stood in front of a large white canvas that was backlit so you couldn’t see that there was a person behind it. That person had a big paint brush and a can of black paint and as the actress went through her story in front of the canvas the artist behind it would paint random bits and pieces of things until at the very end it all came together in a coherent painting. I didn’t understand any of the play of course but it was fascinating watching the artwork come together.
When the play ended there was a short break and we took this as an opportunity to say our goodbyes. It was a long day under the bright summer sun of Basilicata. It was a good day. It was a day to remember.
By David McKay
