Cape Cod to Napoli

                Cape Cod to Napoli    

June 9^th was a cold, wet, Cape Cod day. The arc of the Chatham Lighthouse swept through the swirling mist and the moan of its foghorn was muffled by a thick wet blanket of rain and fog.

I was using the dreary day to rummage through my parents empty house when I came across a tattered old book wrapped in plain brown paper.

The frontis piece of the book said it contained the recollections of Eva Ballerini, my great, great, grandmother.

Eva’s story started miles away from Cape Cod among the sun filled vineyards of Tuscany and sophisticated streets of Firenze. That was where her father Felice had been born and gone to college.

Felice was a follower of King Victor Emmanuel and wanted to have a career in the king’s army but fate stepped in when he met a local beauty from a prominent Tuscan family.

He wished to marry Marianna Casaglia but knew he could never support a family on a modest army salary so he rode to Rome to seek the advice of the king.

Victor Emmanuel kindly urged Felice to marry Marianna and pursue a business opportunity he knew of in Cairo. If the venture failed he promised Felice he could always provide a position for him in the Royal Household.

Felice and Marianna married and had six children in Cairo but four of their children died so their doctor advised the couple to return to Italy.

There, Felice appealed to the king again, and was hired to take charge of Capodimonte, the king’s mountainside villa outside Naples.

So it was in Capodimonte where Eva was born, but her mother also died giving birth. This left Felice to care for Eva, her two brothers and sister Italia.

But Felice was a kind-hearted father who had a special affection for Eva because she had lost her mother.

After work, Felice would rush home and hold Eva in his arms and tell her stories about his day. At night he would tuck her into bed and they would both say a prayer to their dear departed Marianna.   

Though Felice was often lonely he never remarried because he didn’t want any of his children to have to live with a stepmother.

So it was in Capodimonte that Eva first became aware of breathing the crisp mountain air, feeling the balmy sun and hearing the song of birds amongst the tall trees and profusion of wild flowers surrounding their villa, which is now a beautiful art museum.

But to Eva it was simply home. Every morning she would watch her father and the king disappear into the forest to shoot quail and pheasants.

Every evening she would ask her father why he shot the birds and he would explain they were increasing in number, and that the king always distributed the game to local villagers, leaving very little for himself.

It never quite made sense.

But late one night, Felice ran into Eva’s room, wrapped her in a blanket for protection and took her out to the balcony.  The sky was pitch black except for red-hot boulders shooting into the sky and long tongues of lava flowing down the sides of Mount Vesuvius. It was 1872.

The next morning Eva was taken back to the balcony to look again. As far and she could see the land was covered with steaming black ash.

The scene was distressing for Eva and a total disaster to the villagers who had lost their homes, fields and crops to the explosively erratic volcano.

But Eva was impressed that despite such disasters the villagers would return to the desolate wasteland again and again to rebuild their homes and replant their fields and vineyards because they believed that no other land was quite so productive and beautiful.

She had learned that her countrymen held an innate love of their land. A true Italian would no more abandon his land than abandon his children. She understood, for she too had been abandoned at birth by her mother.

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