Ancestry Magazine

I spoke with him in Italian as best I could and was met with a flurry of a response under his breath. He led me into a small windowless room with a desk, chair, and shelves of old record books, the ranges of dates printed on them from the early 1900s forward, and left me alone.

Joann poked her head in, took a sweeping look at the stack of books in front of me. “Mamma mia,” we muttered in unison.

The books were huge and heavy. A puff of fine dust seemed to escape when I opened one, the musty smell of having been trapped for decades. I put in front of me the book that was within easiest reach and scanned the left margins searching for “Maria Faenzi.” But I knew something wasn’t quite right.

I closed my eyes and remembered a conversation. I was sitting with my grandparents Ottavio and Olga on the front porch of their house on a quiet summer afternoon years before. Olga was telling me the names of Ottavio’s family. I remembered she started giggling.

“My mother-in-law’s name was Maria and she had a funny maiden name, didn’t she Otto—your mother?”

Otto sat placidly in his chair, nodded his head as he chewed on his pipe stem but said nothing, only smiled.

Olga said, “Mangiavacchi! Do you know what that name means, Carol?”

“Hmmm…eat something, right?”

“Si. Eat cows! What a name to have, my goodness.”

Now, this is not a name easily discarded from memory, so I returned to my search, now armed with the right name.

The handwriting in the second book I randomly selected was almost floral, and when my eyes saw the large sweeping “M” of Mangiavacchi at the bottom of a page halfway through it, I started laughing. Olga was laughing with me.

I learned that Maria died 14 November 1941. She was sixty-nine years old. Her parents’ names were listed as Teodoro and Lavinia. So now I had yet another generation’s first names.

I left the book open and went out into the glare of midday to find my fellow sleuths. The caretaker smiled at my obvious triumph and kept on with his work.

As we left the cemetery, I waved to the signora who was cutting stems of pink blossoms. She asked me if I found who I was looking for.

“Si, ho trovato la mia bisnonna….I found my great-grandmother!” I said. She looked about as happy as we did.

We spent the rest of the day discovering more of Pitigliano’s small streets. We visited the church where Ottavio was baptized. We sat in the ages old piazza and I thought of him as a young man, flirting with girls during summer evenings.

We had a hotel reservation in San Gimignano that night, so we lingered over a long lunch, reluctantly refusing the cold white vino vernaccia that would have caused us to want to take the usual catnap. We left town a little later than we had planned but felt no rush. The rocky terrain of this area, so ancient, so unchanged, causes one to slow down, to just be. What’s the hurry?

I wanted to make a stop in nearby Sorano since the ship manifest I had found through the Ellis Island archives clearly stated Ottavio’s city of residence as Sorano.

But as we drove away from Pitigliano, I remembered the rest of that conversation with my grandparents.

“Nonno, Grandfather, you were born in Pitigliano, right?” I asked him years before. At the time, the family was secretly planning a gift for their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary, their names to be inscribed on the Wall of Honor at Ellis Island and the names of their cities of birth were required.

Ottavio nodded and said, “Yep.”

Olga fidgeted, “Otto! You were not born in Pitigliano. Your father was, but you were born in Sorano.”

He took his pipe out of his mouth and piped up, “No, I was born in Sant’anna.” This argument went back and forth between them for several minutes while I began to wonder if I would ever have an answer. Instead, Olga announced it was time for dinner and the mystery of Otto’s birthplace lingered. That night, after a glass or two of chianti, Ottavio’s birthplace seemed less important.

But now again it was, as I searched for Sant’anna on maps in the vicinity of Pitigliano and Sorano with no luck at all.

When we entered the limits of Sorano, we were immediately charmed by how the stone entry was carved and the way bright flowers tumbled in its crevices, making it impossible for us not to want to walk through it.

A humble doorway led us into a shop selling olive-wood products—spoons, cutting boards, cooking utensils of all sizes and shapes filled cases and were suspended overhead. The owner was seated near the entrance and smoking as he was talking to another man, also smoking, mostly ignoring us as we looked around. I chose a few of the finely carved spoons but was feeling anxious. Was I going to speak up? Was I going to ask?

As the owner wrapped up my purchases in stiff white paper, not allowing this task to interrupt the flow of his conversation or cigarette, I heard my own voice in Italian: “Excuse me, Signore. I have family here in Sorano. The name is Faenzi. My grandfather was born nearby in a place called Sant’anna. Do you know where it is?”

Hi face lit in recognition. With his cigarette still hanging from his lip, he said, “There is a woman, Catia Faenzi, who works in the bar near the bank.”

We followed his directions and found the bar. A woman, perhaps in her late thirties, was behind the bar making a café freddo for a customer. She looked at me, ready to receive our order.

“Are you Catia Faenzi?” I asked. She nodded. “We are your American cousins,” I said.

She cocked her head as if she had not heard correctly.

I said, “We are your American cousins, Catia. This is Ottavio’s daughter,” as I put my hand on Joann’s shoulder. “And Danilo and I are his grandchildren.”

I opened Olga’s worn journal that I was carrying with me and turned to the page where she had made a list of Ottavio’s brothers. I put it on the bar and turned it around so she could see it.

Her hands came to either side of her suddenly red cheeks. She pointed at the names on the page and said, “This is my father and this is my grandfather! Mamma mia!”

The next thing I knew she was on the phone that was hanging on the wall behind her, speaking with her mother, her hands as frantic as her speech.

Knowledge itself may be void of emotion, but it is a door that can take you in a flash from being a stranger to being in someone’s arms—we could have easily gone into that bar, ordered coffee and never have known we had encountered a member of our family. But Catia was Joann’s second cousin, and when she hung up the phone, she came around from behind the bar and we all embraced with the instant love that comes upon you when you realize the same blood flows in your veins, even if a moment before, all that might have passed between you was a transaction and a couple of euros.

In my world, this felt like a minor miracle.

A dusty miniature car roared up and screech-stopped in front of the bar. Two old men emerged and again, embraces went around as we learned these men were Ghino, Catia’s father, a small brown man with a smile that seldom left his face, and Gino, his brother. They were nephews of Ottavio.

“Andiamo! Let’s go!” they said. Ghino got into our car with Danilo and me; Joann was put into their car with Gino at the wheel. Catia waved and said something about seeing us later.

“So where do you think we are going?” Danilo asked as I was trying to decipher the instructions that were rapidly coming from Ghino in the backseat.

“To Sant’anna, I hope.”

And just as the words came out of my mouth, I saw the tiniest of signs. “Sant’anna,” it read. It was just a slender piece of weather-beaten wood with an equally small arrow, but it was like finally finding that annoying last miniscule puzzle piece you need to finish a corner. It may drive you crazy, but it is supremely satisfying when it snaps into place.

The farm came into view. The entire family lived there. And over the course of the next couple of hours, everyone showed up, two or ten at a time.

We met Ghino’s wife and Catia’s mother, Telma, who was bouncing Catia’s son, Alessandro, on her hip. I smiled when I realized that the Faenzi tradition of naming the firstborn son of each generation “Alessandro” was alive over here too.

Gino’s wife, Luigina, was the undisputed matriarch, immediately obvious from her presence, even though she was barely five feet tall. She has a ruddy but beaming complexion, a squat body that caused her to waddle a bit when she walked and an iron grip that I felt as she placed her hand on my arm to guide me where she desired me to go.

Drinks were poured, snacks were offered and then the questions came like lasers, everyone trying to understand exactly who we were, where we all lived, how we came to be here in the first place, where we were going, who’s married, and so on. I took a deep breath and did my best to explain, answer, listen, and understand.

After a while, things calmed down. We walked around the farm, under the cherry trees. I looked out over the land. Horses grazed, the lush rolling hills of Toscana went on forever into the horizon, olive trees and grapevines basked in the slant of the sun’s rays, cypress trees like exclamatio n points on slopes. Happy tears sprung.

Gino showed us his wine cave. The dark of the cave was as stunning as the plunge in temperature. The damp stone room smelled fertile and sweetly overripe. I closed my eyes and was transported to the dark, damp basement of my grandparent’s home where Ottavio made his wine in a large oak barrel. The grapes came from his backyard Indiana vineyard and it would bring tears to my eyes when it was served at Christmas, so young it was in its boldness. Here, however, they made their wine from sangiovese grapes. Gino proudly handed Danilo a bottle; wine is such a noble gift. Telma gave us a bottle of the olive oil they produced on the farm that, in the late day sun, shimmered in the glass like liquid gold.

The hours went by and we knew we had to be on our way. The news that we were going to San Gimignano was met with disbelief. The hour was late. This was not the time to be driving there. And why would we want to go there anyway? Spend the night, stay here, don’t worry.

I knew that if I were alone, I would not have hesitated to change the plan, but I also knew my companions could not. I looked at Luigina’s face as she pressed letters into my hands. These letters were from my grandmother Olga to her, over a forty-year span, as they wrote to each other after my grandparents visited in 1962. What I saw in her face was the belief that when we left, it would mean we would not see each other again.

These old faces, these last links to our past that so soon would be gone, and with them, the chance to know so exquisitely who we are and where we came from. I wouldn’t have found these people if Olga had not left clues for me in her journals and if I had not asked strangers how to find my family.

Now that I know where they are, I will come back here. I will look at the photograph I have of Catia, smiling at me as she stands on the road leaving Sant&rsquo ;anna with the burnished gold and copper rays of the sun descending onto emerald-green hills behind her. I will sit in the garden with Luigina as she tells me more about my grandmother. I will sip some of Gino’s sangiovese as he tells me what it was like to grow up here, stories he heard of my grandfather and his brothers. And I will remember the stories that I already know, the stories I learned from Olga and Ottavio themselves, and the new ones I’m experiencing every day.