The Parish Cat
Misleading you with a red-herring title because you probably don't want to hear another word about genealogy
Cari amici,
I’d hoped to write a proper letter on the train home on Tuesday, after a week of travel, but it will have to wait. My brain is overloaded with new info and my heart with family discoveries. But I can say this: a few days in Padova with day jaunts to Venezia and Vicenza pale in comparison to meeting a young cousin in Milano and tracing my Ossola ancestors back to the mid-1500s (which totally blows my mind).
The latter event happened in Rodero, a tiny town on the Swiss border in Lombardia, in the parish archive. Among my assistants there was the parish house resident cat, Lea (short for Leonessa), who was entertaining if not helpful. Elena, my trusted genealogist and friend, worked her usual investigatory miracles, and we had non-feline companionship in Don Adolfo, the retired parish priest, and Silvana, a parishioner who has deciphered centuries of church records and who gave us eight pages of notes about the Ossola line before we even arrived. These are good people.
The parish house stands next to the beautiful Chiesa dei Santi Simone e Giuda. The original church on that site, originally called Chiesa di San Fedele Martire, was documented as far back as 1380 and underwent many changes over the centuries. That means that though I’d like to picture many of my ancestors being baptized, married, and mourned in the church I saw, they probably wouldn’t recognize it now (its current façade was built in 1926). Then again, the interior might have not have changed quite so much.
Our discovery of Rodero’s major role in my family’s history has led me to a crisis of loyalty, not to mention identity. For years I’ve claimed Viggiù as my father’s paternal ancestors’ home, but now I know that the 20-ish years they spent there are nothing compared to the 243 (at least) years they lived in Rodero. So yes, my paternal grandfather, born in Viggiù, was viggiutese, but most of my Ossola family was roderese. And that matters because Italian identity isn’t so much national as it is regional, provincial, and even (especially) municipal. For a time, Viggiù and Rodero could both claim the province of Como as theirs (Viggiù is now part of the province of Varese), but that doesn’t mean the citizens of one town felt any kind of kinship with the citizens of the other. They were, and are, viggiutesi and roderesi first, lombardi second, and italiani third.
I’m so taken with this new information that I was distracted for the rest of my trip. As beautiful as Padova is, if I’d traveled by car instead of train I would have cut short my time there and hightailed it back to Rodero to soak up whatever impressions I could imagine of life there in the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s. (Elena and I had no time to explore the town, arriving there late after having spent the morning in the big parish archives in Milano.)
When I do go back, I’ll be more prepared with knowledge of Rodero’s history, thanks to Don Adolfo. He mentioned a book about the history of the town, a shared project of church and comune, and when I later asked if it was still in print, he said no. Only a few copies remained, he said, kept in the parish house for reference. I must have looked pretty disappointed because a little while later he left the room and came back with the book, a hefty 300-plus pages of coated stock, with plenty of illustrations. I thought he just wanted to show it to me, but no; he gave it to me. (Note to self: keep wearing your heart on your sleeve.)
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time in Italy, it’s that what’s deemed impossible often isn’t. Sometimes it means trying again another day or with another person. I’ve found that my rather over-the-top enthusiasm about being in the places my family once called home makes people willing or even eager to help me discover their traces. And I’ve learned that long shots are always worth it; for example, the time I left a note for some distant relatives on a grave in the Arcisate cemetery, without knowing if they’d find it, and in return got an email reply, plus a partial family tree.
That’s all for now. I need to read, gather my spinning thoughts, and sift through pages and pages of documents to add to my family tree. I want to write about language , and Padova, and the briganti in the borderlands of southern Lazio between the Papal States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (a topic that takes more research than I’ve had time for lately). I want to tell you about my broadening perspective on Italy, now that I’ve been here for nearly six years, and fascinating tidbits from a book I’m reading about Italy’s history.
And you, what do you want to read about? Tell me in the comments.
Tante belle cose. Alla prossima—
Cheryl
P.S. My book! Which you can buy here or on the usual sites, or, better yet, order it from your local bookstore. Another fab option is to ask your library to stock it. If you read it and like it, please tell your friends and/or leave a few lines of praise on any bookish site. You’d be surprised how much a rating or review helps authors. Baci!
Your posts about genealogy are very interesting to read. Thank you for sharing your research both regarding your own family and in a larger picture.
Love your breakdown of the Italian sense of identity-- municipal, regional, and then national. You see it also during things like the palio--- suddenly there is the fierce loyalty to neighborhood that takes precedence over the town as a whole.