I HAD ALWAYS BEEN, even without knowing it, a lost son of Italy. I think most Italian-Americans are the country’s lost sons and daughters. We forgot our language, we forgot our family stories. We forgot what our names meant and we forgot what roles we had played in history. In America, we were supposed to be new people. Some of us changed our names or we gave our children names that would not, on first notice, smack of any kind of ethnic affinity. It was only through my own personal interest and research that I had learned the family stories. In uncovering these forgotten stories, I began to learn the real reasons why we left Italy.

The story about how I learned the truth started when I was 30 years old, to the day. I had spent the night before celebrating my birthday with friends at a restaurant in Estonia, then taken a night bus to Tallinn Airport, pausing only to buy a few gifts for relatives, mostly boxes of Estonian and Finnish chocolates, and one bottle of vodka, which would be prized among any nation other than the Italians. I would come to regret purchasing that bottle of vodka.

***

That morning the plane carried me from the November frosts of the Baltic and across the expanse of the German countryside to Munich, where I changed planes. From the air, Germany was a tidy patchwork of church steeples and fields. These were disrupted by the massive Alps, rocky and jagged, spiked with ice. Then came the valleys of the Po, and those black-green, forested hills, the Apennines. From the mons of the Alps sprang this nether region called Italy, dark and intriguing, the genitals of Europe swaying down into the Mediterranean.

I was a little nervous as that plane descended toward its destination. I had been to Italy before then, but as a simple tourist. This trip though would take me to places I hadn’t been before and put me into situations I had never experienced. I was to travel from the capital Rome deep into the South, meeting with relatives I had never met before, serving as a kind of self-appointed family ambassador, making up for decades of no contact. I had no idea what to expect, but I was willing to take the plunge. I was married, had two small children, and was soundly employed. I did feel kind of stuck. I had just turned 30 and things needed shaking up.

Inside, I still had the heart of an adventurer, I think. I yearned to discover something new. This new discovery would be Italy, but not the Italy of Rome or Venice, of art galleries and souvenir shops, or fashion boutiques and tours of Tuscan vineyards. I was already aware, vaguely, that I was about to leap off into the unknown, into a world where nobody spoke English, and I spoke only a little bit of Italian. Still, I have always enjoyed these kinds of challenges.

At last, we landed in Fiumicino, right on the coast at the very spot where the Tiber begins its snaky crawl toward the heart of the old empire. Here I found my way through an apocalyptic wasteland of industrial parks splashed with graffiti, the reeking armpit of the capital. Whichever way you turned, Rome was dirty and foul, a pungent and fermenting heap of trash and history. The air smelled of trains, of fried foods, of espresso, car exhaust, cigarettes, and pigeons. It smelled of the crisp uniforms of the carabinieri, the tangled shampooed locks of the Roman women as they sped by on Vespas, clutching the waists of their daredevil boyfriends.

I took a train into the central station, and then walked a few blocks to my hostel. The manager on duty took my money and shook my hand and wished me a happy birthday, as he had noticed it was my birthday when he copied down the information from my passport. He next gave me the keys to my room. It would only be a night there before I left for Bari. In the next room, some young American women were already drinking wine in the afternoon and boisterously toasting to each other. “To a happy vacation in Italy with lots of hot Italian men!” 

I strongly doubted that they would consider me to be one of these exotic men and I felt a little insulted by the idea that that’s all an Italian could ever mean to them. A quick fling on a Roman holiday. Some Mediterranean spice to their otherwise white bread lives. They would go home and marry some boring man in Indianapolis or Houston or god knew where they called home. They would marry a normal man with a normal name, but there would always be Italy! 

I was so annoyed by them that I decided the only thing that could lift my spirits would be a walk to see the Colosseum and a slice of pizza. I remember that moment, sitting with my back against the wall, listening to those girls. Sometimes, I wasn’t proud to be an American. 

That was one of those times.

***

THE NEXT MORNING I was back at the train station with my backpack, stuffed with boxes of Estonian chocolates and that bottle of Estonian vodka. I bought a ticket for Bari Centrale and took a seat on the train across from an older woman who wore a giant crucifix around her neck and spent her time surfing the web on a laptop, or calling by phone to check on various relatives. This is a four-hour journey that takes you to the outskirts of Naples and then straight across to the other side of the peninsula. You know you are close to Bari when you can at least see the Adriatic from your window. You see the quiet Adriatic and the lights from the ships sailing on it. When we at last arrived at Bari Centrale, I somehow could not believe it. I couldn’t believe I had gone back, even though I had never stepped foot in the city. For a moment, I almost thought it was a film set, to see that sign hanging above informing me that this was the real Bari: the Bari I had only seen in photos and atlases. It was evening and the moisture of the Adriatic was everywhere. That smell of the sea put me at ease. It was familiar to me, and I felt my body relax, even though I was about to come face to face with a relative.

A cousin that I had never met. 

I knew of course that my ancestors had come from this port city in the south, and thanks to some correspondence my cousin Mary Ann — a granddaughter of the famous Uncle Vinny — had initiated, as well as some social media dialogues with this newly discovered relative named Cousin Lorenzo, I now had an invitation to dinner in Adelfia, which sits outside the city. 

Cousin Lorenzo and I met via Facebook. Perhaps only because of his last name, he was suggested as a friend to me, considering all of the other Abbatecolas on my friend’s list (Abbatecola being my mother’s maiden name). Not only was I interested in him, he was interested in me. He wanted to meet this lost American relative. Something about the promise of America still stirs the fantasies of Italians. Bright lights, big cities. Fame and fortune. New York, Chicago, Hollywood and Disneyland. Almost every Italian has a lost relative to the American Dream. Almost none of them came back to old Italy, and after a while, all contact with these dreamers ceased. Before I arrived at Bari Centrale, Lorenzo sent me a message. 

He wrote:

I am in station. Yuo take off and wait. See a black hat in my hand.

There he was, Cousin Lorenzo, standing beneath the big sign that said Bari, with dark hair and a familiar face. We approached each other with great curiosity. From what we had determined, Lorenzo was a distant cousin to me. My great grandfather, Domenico was the son of a man named Vincenzo Abbatecola, who was born in the year 1846, when Italy wasn’t a country. Lorenzo’s forefather was Vincenzo’s brother. His name, as you might expect, was also Lorenzo.

I remember that feeling of meeting Cousin Lorenzo for the first time. I would not say it was an odd or funny feeling, but everything about him was so familiar to me. It was as if I had staggered into the bathroom at some early hour and glanced at myself in the mirror. Many people had told me that I didn’t look like a real Italian, because I was so tall, but Lorenzo was as tall as I was, and he looked me directly in the eyes. We were undoubtedly related, we few tall Italians, and I wondered about who our common tall Italian ancestor was, who looked this way, and when he had lived and under what circumstances. Was there once a tall villager in some village in Italy in the 17th century who looked like me and Lorenzo? Was he also one of us?

After having known Cousin Lorenzo for a few seconds, I determined he was everything I imagined an Italian cousin should be. Lorenzo was about the same age. We had entered this world at the same time and had grown up on opposite sides of a great ocean, speaking different languages, unaware of each other’s existence. Lorenzo was here in Italy. I was over there in America. He was doing his Italian things, like kicking a soccer ball against a wall. I was doing my American things, like also kicking a soccer ball against a wall. Only that that wall was in America, not in Italy. We did not know each other and yet, in a second, by looking into each other’s eyes, we arrived both at an understanding. Two shadows meeting on a train platform.

“Cugino?” Lorenzo said to me at the train station. “Cousin? Is it really you?”

***

AFTER THAT, I was more or less immediately accepted into the warm bosom of my new family. Each night, I was invited to dinner at Cousin Lorenzo’s parents’ house in Adelfia. Adelfia was a patchwork of multi-story stone houses of indeterminate age, separated from each other by narrow streets and narrower alleyways. There was an ancient, dusty, almost Middle Eastern feeling to these rows of beige and white homes. Lorenzo’s house was among them, accessible from the street through a metal gate. Meals in general were the domain of Giuseppina, his diminutive and vivacious mother, who worked through the day to prepare them. Giuseppe, her husband, would later arrive as would Lorenzo’s sisters Pamela and Antonella. All of them showed great curiosity in me, as if I was an alien or something and brought me different kinds of sweets, dolci, and explained their regions of origin and historical significance. “This is a local sweet,” Antonella would say. “But this one here comes from Sicily. See, you can tell by the use of orange slices.” Antonella had wonderfully thick black curly hair. She looked like one of those women from an ancient Greek vase. Pamela had a fun, playful, boundless energy to her.

Antonella’s boyfriend Lello would also be there while I was being instructed about different sweets, yawning through the evening news. The most important news in Italy at the time involved Piero Marrazzo, the governor of Lazio, a region adjacent to Rome, who had been filmed taking drugs and having sex with some Brazilian transsexuals. One of these transsexual prostitutes died later in a mysterious fire. By eating together with the family, I therefore learned a great deal about Italian culture. Much had changed since my great grandfather left. 

Some things remained the same.

Cousin Lorenzo showed me the lemon trees in the yard, as well as the wine press in the basement. Each year, Lorenzo’s family would harvest the grapes from the vineyards and make wine at a certain time, all so that it would be ready for the great Feast of San Trifone, the patron saint of Adelfia, as every Italian village and city has its own patron saint, if not several of them. Meals with his family were familiar, salad, pasta, fish or meat, washed down with this same homemade wine. After the meals, they would munch on stalks of garden-grown fennel, or then indulge ripe fleshy slices of cachi, or persimmons. The tiny cups of hot espresso would come around and a shot of limoncello, the famed liqueur made with grain alcohol, sugar, and boiled lemon rinds, or its lesser known cousin, mandorino, which is made with the skins of oranges. Then these sons and daughters of Italy would lean back and make conversation. 

Such were their ways.

***

ONE AFTERNOON, Uncle Vincenzo, or “Enzo” for short, was invited over to discuss the history of the family with me. Enzo was the son of Michele, my great grandfather Domenico’s older brother. At that time, he was about 70 years old, a spry old man with gray hair and glasses and palpable energy. Enzo marched into the dining room, where we were sitting around eating cachi and pointed. Enzo said, “Your great grandfather was the one who beat up the priest.”

Everyone laughed then. I  and what surprised me was that they all seemed to know the story. As for me, I was speechless and did not know how to react. I had never heard the story, and yet I was not surprised. That side of my family was known for these kinds of transgressions. Relatives were known to wield a bat with people who crossed them the wrong way. Tempers flared, impulses could not be contained. Sometimes an argument overheated and the police might be called in to calm things down. In a way, I was almost relieved that Domenico had only beaten the priest and not killed this man of god. Certainly, I was embarrassed by the story and the attention. To think that I had come all this way to be confronted by Domenico’s past. 

But he was my great grandfather. Surely he had had his reasons.

This had happened in the early 1900s. More than a century ago. The story had been carried forward though, and Enzo was now closing the circle. He was pulling the threads between then and now, between America and Italy, between me and him. The priest, he said, had taken a liking to Domenico and Michele’s sister. He had crossed the line on several occasions. And so Domenico and his younger brother Saverio, who were running a brewery, decided to settle scores. They attacked the lecherous priest with police batons, injuring him badly. The news soon spread quickly, and my great grandfather and his younger brother sought counsel from their father, a businessman, as well as older brother Michele, Enzo’s father, a policeman. “He said, if it was anyone else I could protect you,” Enzo recalled his father’s words. “But this is a Catholic country. If you beat up a priest, you will go to jail. You have to leave the country.”

This is what had sent Saverio and Domenico to the Port of Naples seeking passage to New York. Later, Enzo told me there was more to the story. The incident was not only related to protecting the honor of their sister. They also had “big political problems,” as Enzo had put it.

“They were anarchists,” he said, anarchici. “That’s why they did it.”

“Anarchists?”

Enzo nodded. Anarchici. The word sounded strange and dangerous. It sounded like men with mustaches lurking in the vestibules of churches with police batons ready to pounce. It sounded like terrorists robbing banks or cutting the throats of policemen in their sleep. I had read once of anarchists in Italy who had stolen and burned bank records in a bonfire, as to eliminate any records of people’s debts. With no debts, people could start again fresh. They could rebuild their lives. I remembered thinking that it sounded like a wonderful idea. 

Many people I knew had all kinds of different people in their families. Especially in Estonia, it wasn’t hard to meet someone who descended from a notorious Communist, or perhaps someone who had helped the Nazi German regime a little too enthusiastically during the grim and bloody war years. But anarchists? Anarchici? I was the great grandson of an anarchist? What did that even mean? Could anarchism be passed down, like so many other things? 

Was I an anarchist too? 

***     

WHEN I LATER called my mother and told her the story, she said that she had heard something like this whispered around her when she was a child. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but they knew that it was bad. That was our family. We were passionate, but perhaps too passionate. Whether we were followers of the anarchist Errico Malatesta and read his paper Umanità Nova, or claimed to know nothing of it, you didn’t want to cross us. 

For me, personally, this story opened a door to another era. It helped me to better understand my links to this country we left behind. Not long ago, there had been a predecessor just like me, who felt passionately about various injustices in the world. He had sat here in this same comune or municipality outside of Bari, under the influence of the revolutionary anarchists. The story of the two brothers and the priest therefore helped me to feel closer to my origins. It kicked open a door. Just as that door had opened before me, many others would open.