If you want to see the real Italy in the form of a beautiful, charming, traditional village in the hills, you need to go to Rivisondoli in the province of Abruzzo. However, if you are going to chase down your heritage, I would suggest you speak at least the slightest bit of Italian, do even a marginal amount of research, and perhaps find out a couple names of your ancestors. I can't say I did any of that, but I was planning all of the details of a full week in Italy and there just isn't time for everything.
To give you some quick background on my motivations for visiting this town, my dad's grandparents were both born and raised in this village. When I obtained my Italian citizenship a few years ago, my Italian birth certificate was issued from Rivisondoli. I have countless ancestors that would have lived in this town, and probably tons of distant relatives who still do. I wanted to see where my family came from.
What I did successfully plan was how to get to Rivisondoli from Rome. Sort of. Last minute. I knew there were buses that ran out there, so the day before we were leaving Rome I looked up a few different routes and timetables and consulted with the girl at reception. It's faster to drive, but have you seen the Italians on the roads? I'll pass. We got an Arpa bus from the Tiburtina station and had to first go to Sulmona. It was a two hour ride east, but the bus was comfy, we had gorgeous views of the countryside, and I was able to nap.
We made it to Sulmona around 2 in the afternoon. Our next bus wasn't for an hour, but it was a sunny day and we'd been dropped off outside of a bar/convenience store, so we bought a few beers and sat out on a bench enjoying the weather in this small mountainside town. It's not the worst layover I've ever had.
Also, funnily enough, we met an American couple who had gotten off the bus with us, and they were from the Cleveland area. Typical. I would meet Northeast Ohioans in the middle of the Italian countryside.
The bus to Roccaraso only took about twenty minutes, and we got dropped off at a cafe on the side of the road. There was nothing else around except for a village back in the hills behind the shop, so we went in and tried to find out where we were going. Nobody spoke English, but we found out that Rivisondoli was the village in the hills back there and that if we didn't walk, the next bus wasn't for another couple hours.
So we took our bags down the main road, turned off at Rivisondoli after about 15 minutes, and then got to the bottom with stairs leading up through the village. It's all uphill. Like, stairs upon stairs.
I knew our B&B was near the church at the center of town, and we could clearly see that as we were walking up, so it was our goal point. We finally reached it and sat outside to try to figure out the next step. Lewis went inside to see if there might be people, and he came back out to tell me a service was on. I thought it would be cool to attend a mass at the church where my great-grandparents and ancestors would all have probably attended and possibly even gotten married, so I went in. There were only about 10 women in there as well as the priest. I mean, it was a Tuesday afternoon. It's cute that they actually still have daily services. I figured out that they were on the readings, and I stayed at the back of the church until the gospel was over, then I went back outside.
Lewis had stopped a kid in the streets and shown him a piece of paper with the name of our B&B written on it, and the kid pointed uphill, so we walked just a little further. The streets went three different ways, but luckily the kid was wandering by again and pointed right up one of the little streets and there was our B&B, Garni La Rua nel Bosco.
We went inside, and an old man named Patricio greeted us. He did not speak much English, but luckily he knew a few words which is more than I can say for anyone in the rest of the town. We struggled to communicate, but he took us to the room and I managed to figure out the time of breakfast the following day. I asked "Mangia?" (aka "eat?") and he told me no, this was not a restaurant, and I said no, "mañana" which is definitely Spanish and did not translate despite my wishes. Eventually the point got across and luckily I've picked up the basic numbers in Italian (because they're very similar to Spanish), so we got a time as well. He also asked if I had family here, because he said Mascio was a Rivisondoli name! I knew that, of course, but it was exciting to hear someone confirm it.
The B&B was adorable. The lobby and breakfast room was downstairs and was cozy and small with a fireplace, carpeting, little tables, and the small reception desk. Like someone's house. The rooms were upstairs, and ours was so cute. I loved the wooden decor, animal mural, and tiled bathroom.
Both rooms had big windows that opened to balconies, but the balcony outside the bathroom was the only one big enough to walk out onto. It had a great view of the bell tower of the church and the mountains in the distance.
After leaving our things, we went to walk around. Rivisondoli is beautiful! I can't believe my family came from this unbelievable storybook little village in the hills! It's so quiet and the air smelled like wood fire. Nobody spoke English. There were little alleyways up narrow stairways with houses and shops down alleys and it was so cool.
The first thing we did was walk onto this empty square with benches and plants that looked out over the red brick church, and there was a little informational sign there saying that this had been the site of a priceless 18th century building called Palazzo Mascio!! I had been in town for not even an hour and already found my last name! I think I might have jumped up and down a little.
Sitting in the square of my people.
We walked a little further and saw more of the town. All of it is cute.
We came back and went into the church which was now empty with the lights all dimmed. It's pretty simple, but I thought my dad might like to see photos.
When we came out, we went to this little restaurant looking just across the road from the palazzo square. Well, we thought it was a restaurant, but it was more of a bar. I asked "Beve?" for drink, showing off my Italian skills, and we ordered drinks and sat outside at one of the little tables. They brought us a plate of food to snack on like cheeses and breads. I had another glass of wine and I feel the need to point out that I am really not a big wine drinker but in Italy, it just feels like the right thing to order.
We were hungry though and set out to find a restaurant. The problem was it was about 8 or 9 at night and dark by now, so in such a small town, everything was probably closing and we didn't know our way around. The few places we saw were more like snack bars. We ended up in a cafe where I once again showed up and asked "Eat?" in Italian like a foreign simpleton. We got paninis and a beer, but they brought out some chips and peanuts as well. We attempted to chat with the woman who worked there for awhile as well despite the rock-solid language barrier. She seemed very friendly despite the fact that we'd shown up in a fully Italian town and kept attempting to speak to people in English. Or at least she did a good job of pretending.
There wasn't much left to do after that, so we just went back and turned in for the night. I emailed my dad some photos as well. He emailed back sounding impressed (getting a "wow" out of my dad is a massive display of emotion) and also mentioned that his great-grandmother was buried in town, so that gave me a goal for the next day.
In the morning, we went down for breakfast at 9 and met the other owner, Attilio. He made us cappuccinos and we helped ourselves to pastries and croissants. We had also handwritten a note in Italian using Google Translate explaining that we had left my poster on the bus, and he called them for us, but no luck. He was trying to talk to me after we'd eaten and I was trying to find out what the bus company had said, but he didn't speak a word of English, so I ended up going back up to the room and bringing down my laptop so we could use Google Translate.
Well, we ended up typing back and forth for about a half hour! He was asking about my ancestry and if I knew the names of my relatives, and he said his grandmother was a Mascio. We might have been family! Then after Lewis and I took our bags out of the room, Attilio drove us over to the cemetery where I had wanted to look for my relatives and dropped us off.
The cemetery was very pretty.
Most of the graves were in mausoleums, there were only a small handful buried underground. Attilio had told us that the oldest graves were at the back wall, so Lewis and I started there.
I knew my great-great-grandmother's name was also Maria Mascio, but I didn't expect to find so many! Also, a bit weird to see your own name on so many graves. There were at least six Maria Mascios buried there if not more, and I could only eliminate a couple based on dates. (I also mistakenly had it in my head that it was my great-grandmother I was looking for, not my dad's great-grandmother, but luckily I was taking pictures of all of them.)
We looked at every grave in the cemetery and I even climbed the rolling ladder to see the ones that were up higher. Near the end, I decided to go up to the mausoleum in the middle and wrench the door open (it wasn't locked so I assumed it was public), and there were more Mascios in there. Our people were all over that graveyard! There was even a newer mausoleum just for the Mascio family, and although it was locked, I could see through the clear doors that they were all much more recent tombs.
In the end, I emailed my dad the photos I had found, and he thinks he has figured out which one was his great-grandmother...
...and thinks that another one would have been a great-aunt.
Just as we were leaving about an hour later, Attilio had pulled back up out front tapping his wrist like we were running late, took us back to get our suitcases, and then drove us to the bus station in Roccaraso. Lewis had thought we should offer money, and I didn't know if he would take that offensively, but I held out a ten euro note after we got out of the car and he just looked away and held up a finger to stop me in the most Italian way. Then he shook our hands and we told him how great it was to meet him (really trying to convey more through tone of voice than words since he wouldn't have understood us at all), and he left. It was SO kind of him to help us out so much. I was genuinely touched by how helpful he had been.
I think he was confused on the time, because our bus wasn't until 12:30 and we had another hour to wait, but I hadn't wanted to correct him (and probably couldn't have if I tried). We got a beer inside and I tried to buy bus tickets off of the woman in there, even spoke the whole request in Italian!, but she just dragged us outside and rapid-fire spoke to the group of people out there who all laughed. Lewis and I felt that maybe they were making fun of us, so we removed our unwelcome foreignness and took our beer and suitcases a little further down the building wall to sit in the sun while we waited.
I loved everything about visiting Rivisondoli. It's an amazing experience to return to the place where half of your family originated. I would absolutely go back there one day, hopefully with the ability to communicate in full sentences, but I'd love even more for my dad to get to see it.
Our final stop in Italy was Naples, and I have some high and low opinions of that area which I will share in my last entry on this trip.