Oh, Contrarian!

We had breakfast at La Novellina with Anna and Bart, friends of Judy’s. Anna was Judy’s Italian contact who set up our accommodations in Cicagna. Our party was too big for La Novellina, so John and Elaine’s daughters and their men stayed these two nights at another place nearby. Once we had regrouped, we began the ride north to Bettola.

This, by the way, is the single scariest ride of my life. For part of our way, our road ran right through a nature preserve on the side of a mountain, which meant one-lane dirt switchback roads without guard rails. Our drivers handled this amazingly well, and within a couple of hours we had crossed over the mountains and arrived at Bettola, the town where the Lavezzis moved from Soglio in the mid-1800s and from which they emigrated around 1870.

Our accommodations here were at the Villa Enrichetta, which in the USA would be called a dude ranch. Noël says the accommodations reminded her of band camp; and although my own camping recollections are more primitive, it is certainly rustic enough. 

Bettola today has about 3,000 inhabitants, and to my eyes appears to be essentially a bedroom community for the town of Piacenza, about a half hour to the north. It has a very pretty town square and another beautiful church, and a remarkable bar called Vecchia Stazione (the Old Station), tended by a 33-year-old bundle of energy named Francesco Costa. Francesco is an old acquaintance of Judy’s, and has done some research work for her. Although he says his English is poor, he speaks it pretty well–certainly far better than any of us speak Italian. Francesco had us all in for drinks and snacks, and then we settled in at the Villa for dinner before what would be an early morning tomorrow.

Tomorrow, we meet the Big Cheese–about 100 pounds of Parmigiana Reggiano. We’re going on a cheese tour.

One of our purposes in staying here is to use Cicagna as a base of operations for visits to some of the towns near Cicagna. The couple that links the families on this trip consisted of a Soglio boy, Costantino Lavezzi, and a Romaggi girl, Rosa Raggio. (I use the term “town” with some flexibility. Some of the units I describe as “towns” probably aren’t, but some other civic unit.

After lunch, we rejoined the others at the Church of St. Michael in Soglio. This would have been the church where Costantino was baptized. The population has fallen in this area, and now there are very few families left to carry on, so one views these churches by appointment, and Judy had made an appointment for us to see this St. Michaels’s. St. Michael’s in Soglio appears not to be used as an active church any more, but it maintains its own kind of rugged beauty. I noted that it has an organ, but evidently the organ hasn’t been played within living memory. The lady who let us in told us that it hasn’t even been opened in many years.

This is a mountainous area, and the churches, as well as the residences, are built on what might be characterized conservatively as hillsides. From St. Michael’s to the churchyard is a scary walk of just a few hundred yards, and we finished up with a walk around the cemetery, visiting the tombs and graves of many Lavezzos. We found Lavezzo graves, but we don’t have enough information to know just how they are related to us.

Any Lavezzos from the last 150 years would have been descended from siblings of my great-great-great grandfather GB Lavezzo or even more distant relatives, and presumably those ancestors didn’t marry girls with the same surnames as did GB; but I don’t believe we know any now living in Soglio. Family lore has it that the Lavezzos emigrated to San Francisco for the Gold Rush, and I do write to Stephen Lavezzo, who is a teacher there.

After our visit to Soglio, we went to a nearby town called Calvari for lunch with Pier Felice Torre, a local genealogist who has been been working with many Italian-American families to piece together their ancestry. Mr. Torre is charming, elegant, and working gamely to recover from a stroke suffered earlier this year. The place we met is called Bar Torre, and he lives across the street.

From Calvari, we went up behind the hills to Romaggi, birthplace of Rosa Raggio, my great-great-grandmother. The church there–another St. Michael’s–is the one where she was baptized and where she and  Costantino were married. I was invited to look at the campanile, or bell tower, and I walked into its second story, which has to be one of the most uncomfortable and frightening spaces I have ever been in. It has a tiny spiral staircase, rough-cut into stone steps smaller than my feet. Fortunately, the bell-ringer generally didn’t have to climb to the top except to make repairs: the bell ropes ran to the first floor through a one-foot hole in the floor.

I also got a look at the organ, which has about one octave of foot pedals, a single manual of perhaps 48 keys, and about six stops. The pipes were encased in a cabinet, and I didn’t see them. A crank for operating the bellows extends from the side of the case. I don’t know when it was played last, but it’s been a while. At least it can be opened, unlike the one in Soglio.

Romaggi only has about 34 residents, so it’s surprising that this St. Michael’s is still an active worship space. It’s also surprising that next door is an excellent trattoria called Pellegrino (which I think means Pilgrim). Italians eat dinner late, so it was pretty close to 10:00 by the time our drivers got to show off their mountain driving skills again.

Soon we were back to La Novellina in Cicagna, ready for the next stage of our adventure tomorrow.

We’ve come to the end of our time in Rome! Cicagna, the town where we’re staying tonight, is up in the hills of the north. The driving at that end would be challenging, and more difficult if we arrived in the dark. In addition, we intended to drive through Florence on our way. All of those considerations called for a fast getaway this morning, so bright and early we were up and packed for breakfast. A quick goodbye to the sisters (and paying the bills), and we were off in cabs for the EuropAuto office.

We had some delay at EuropAuto. We were to pick up three cars, and only two were ready at 9:30; one hadn’t been delivered yet. It soon arrived, but by the time we were on the road it was nearly 10:30.

We reached Florence about 1:30, and our three drivers dropped off the rest of us in the city center. For the next two hours, we were able to enjoy one of the world’s most beautiful cities. A number of great statues, including Ammannati’s Fountain of Neptune and a copy of Michelangelo’s David, take up much of the Piazza. From there it was a short walk to the Duomo, or cathedral. The cathedral is shocking: you turn a corner and suddenly a gorgeous 200-foot church is standing a few feet in front of you. Very beautiful, very surprising.

We met up with our drivers near the Ponte Vecchio, and we began the rest of the ride to Cicagna. This is when we start to talk about the crazy cities of the north.

Evidently, a couple of centuries ago the nearby town of Soglio was awash with the Lavezzo clan. Our great-great-great-grandfather, GB (probably Giovanni Baptista) Lavezzo, and his wife Caterina Lavezzo, were both from Soglio. That’s right, they both had the last surname. Personally, I think that the idea of calling their children the “Lavezzi” (which would be a plural for “Lavezzo”) probably started as a linguistic joke; it’s certainly the sort of thing I would have done.

GB and Caterina settled in Bettola, today a harrowing ninety-minute drive from Soglio over the mountains bordering the Buonafontana Valley. One of their sons, our great-great-grandfather Costantino, came back to Romaggi, in the Cicagna area, to marry our great-great-grandmother, Rosa Raggio. After Costantino’s death, Rosa and their children, including my great-grandfather Giovanni, emigrated to Chicago in the late 1860s and early 1870s–just before the Great Chicago Fire.

For today, however, the main business was settling us into our accommodations for the night, in a bed-and-breakfast in Cicagna called La Novellina. Once unpacked, it was time to look for dinner. We headed into the town of Piano Dei Ratti to try the Pizzeria da Robertone. Robertone was a bit mystified by the unheralded arrival of eleven Americans, but he and his staff entertained us with great hospitality. We didn’t even attempt to order. Once he made it clear that he would personally see to our dinner, he began serving pairs of plates, one for each end of the table. We lost count, but I think there were a dozen pairs of plates, most of them some sorts of pizza or similar flatbread. They started with sautéed polenta and ended with Nutella calzones. That’s a little more than one pizza per person, along with several bottles of wine and water. We felt pretty happy to pay the bill, which amounted to €160.

The place was pretty raucous, with a fiftieth birthday party and a family dinner also going on, and each of us joining in the other celebrations. Before we left, Robertone invited us to join him for a “digestive,” which turned out to be, basically, shots. Except for our drivers, we obliged.

We headed back to La Novellina ready to fall into our beds before the adventures planned for tomorrow.