Digging Up Family Roots in Sicily
By RUSSELL SHORTO
As a writer I’ve always tended to seek out origins. My first book, about
the search for the historical Jesus, was an attempt to get at the
“real” story behind my Catholic upbringing. After living in Manhattan
for several years, I wrote “The Island at the Center of the World,” a
book about the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, the seed from which
New York City grew.
Recently I began considering my family. Among its manifold curiosities
is our last name. People always ask me about the derivation of “Shorto.”
The story I’d heard as a child was that after my illiterate Sicilian
great-grandparents settled in my hometown of Johnstown, Pa., they
enrolled their children in school and said the name aloud: Sciotto. And
the administrator wrote it as he or she heard it.
Anecdotes like that were good enough before, but once I began to take a
serious interest in my roots they felt soft. I wanted a better sense of
who we were and where we had come from. I’d grown up with some of the
atmosphere of the Old Country — the primal aroma of frying meatballs,
the smothering embraces of old relatives, whispers of Mafia shenanigans,
funny traditions like taping a silver dollar to the bellybutton of a
newborn. But really it was an American childhood. There was almost no
information about how it all began, about the generation that had
emigrated at the start of the 20th century. It wasn’t even clear where
in Sicily the family hailed from.
Having done a good deal of historical research in my time, I knew that
seeking out family roots must be a business filled with vagueness and
generally lacking in eureka moments. I cautioned myself that tracking
ancestors would be a crapshoot. So my initial objective was modest: to
trace the path backward, from Pennsylvania to Sicily.
Maybe it was good to set the bar low, because it didn’t take long to get
results. Some relatives said they thought our roots were in a town near
Messina. My father’s cousin’s wife, who used to drive the oldest aunts
to their doctors’ appointments, and thus served as listener, said she
thought the ancestral home was called “San Pedro Something.” I didn’t
think we were from Mexico, but took “San Pietro” as a possibility.
I did an Internet search of Sciottos in Sicily. A village called San
Pier Niceto, 13 miles from Messina, was among those with the biggest
number of hits. My father then suggested I call his cousin Anthony
Verone, a retired doctor in New York City. Anthony, it turned out,
remembered quite a few things his mother had told him about Antonino
Sciotto, my great-grandfather. Once he’d left Sicily and established
himself in Pennsylvania, he apparently became Johnstown’s first
moonshiner; foreseeing the end of Prohibition, he had a scheme in place
to start a legitimate distillery, a plan that was cut short by his early
death. Did Anthony recall his mother mentioning the name of the
Sicilian village our enterprising forebear had come from? He pronounced
it straightaway: “San Pier Niceto.”
So I had confirmation: the hometown of my father’s grandfather. But
Anthony told me one thing more. Not only Antonino Sciotto, but Anna
Maria Previte, the woman he would marry, had also come from San Pier
Niceto. I’d known Previte as a name in the family, but didn’t realize
that both of these ancestors had emigrated from the same Sicilian
village to Pennsylvania coal and steel country.
By now my interest was piqued. A more substantial plan began to take shape, one that involved airplanes.
I’d been to the Italian mainland many times, but never to Sicily. I had
no intention of trying to do the whole island. The plan was that the
contingent of our blended family that was able to join me would stay in
one place, relax, eat good food and give ourselves some sense of the
island’s dizzying history. I’d be exploring my family background, but,
again, in a limited, roundabout way. As for San Pier Niceto, my idea was
to just show up in town and poke around: simply to get a feel for the
place my people had come from.
At the last minute, however, I sent an e-mail to the town hall of San
Pier Niceto explaining my interest. Moments later someone with the
unlikely name of Mario Italiano friend-requested me on Facebook. In
English that probably matched what my Italian sounds like (“Happy to
meet, I’ll give you my phone number — and my wife”), he pronounced
himself at my service.
My favorite form of accommodation in Italy is agriturismo — working
farms that double as countryside hotels — so I booked one in the
province of Messina that had both a swimming pool (we were going in late
July) and top reviews. I figured if it was in the same province as my
destination it would be close enough. This was my first lesson on travel
in Sicily: mountains add dramatically to the length of a trip. We were
staying only about 30 miles from San Pier Niceto but an hour and a half
away.
What’s more, the last 12 miles of the drive to the farm were on a
winding road into the heart of the Nebrodi Park, a protected area much
of which is forest. It was night by the time we arrived, and we sighted
foxes and porcupines in the headlights. The remoteness was reinforced
the next night, when we were awakened by what sounded like people moving
outside our windows. It turned out to be a colony of wild pigs, their
primeval forms, silver in the moonlight, looking like things orcs might
ride.
But remote was good. Even if it wasn’t focused, this trip had a purpose,
which had little to do with standard-issue tourism. With such a base,
we had the feeling of being in the real Sicily: far from coastal
resorts, in the sparsely populated interior, among the cicadas and olive
trees and baked earth.
Every agriturismo has a story. In this case, our host, Alfonso,
represented the fifth generation of his family to farm here. Twenty
years ago he added guest rooms, making his farm one of Sicily’s first
agriturismos. He and his wife, Josie, assisted by a Ghanaian named Alex,
do just about everything associated with the accommodation of guests.
We ate about half of our meals at the agriturismo. The food was good,
simple but inventive, and almost all of it came from the farm. The baked
ricotta tart served as a first course at dinner one night came from
their cows’ milk. Blackberry and fig jam were made from the fruit that
grew around the group of old stone buildings where we were housed. The
evening after the wild pig experience, the secondo on the menu was
...roasted wild pig. A man in the nearest town, who serves as the farm’s
cheesemaker, occasionally traps one of the pigs, whereupon it ends up
on the menu. As to the farm itself, villagers from the town harvest
olives, cork and fruit and tend the animals, which free-range through
the more than 1,200 acres of woods and brush.
During the week we kept mostly to the mountainous interior of Messina
province and to the Tyrrhenian coast, immersing ourselves in what you
might call my ancestral landscape. We had dinner one evening in the
resort town of Taormina, including a terrific rendition of one of the
island specialties, pasta with swordfish and fresh mint. We spent one
day at Cefalù, famed as the location of the film “Cinema Paradiso,”
dividing our time between its fine sandy beach packed with Italian
holidaymakers (middle-aged men with paunches jutting out over
precipitously narrow Speedos) and its pretty old city of ancient
clustered houses.
We also visited some of the hill towns in the region. San Marco
d’Alunzio sits so dizzyingly high up that you feel in constant danger of
plunging into the surrounding ravines. Yet it pulsed with Italian
street life: kids on motor scooters, people sitting at outdoor cafe
tables gesturing noisily over espressos. The expansive ruins of Tindari,
near the coast, attest that it too once pulsed with life. It thrived
for more than a millennium starting about 395 B.C., had at one time a
population of 5,000, but now exists only as a well-tended archaeological
site.
San Fratello, the town nearest our agriturismo, is a cross between these
two. Its still functioning center is a dusty and colorless place, but
stretched across the hilltop above it is one of the many antiquities
sites that are so common on this island that has been colonized or
conquered by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spaniards and others. The
oldest part of the site is a rangy archaeological complex that was once a
Greek temple devoted to the cult of Apollo. Rising above it is a ruined
church dating to the Norman invasion in the 11th century; it later
served as a Franciscan monastery. The site isn’t on any map or guidebook
that I know of. It surely isn’t the most spectacular historic site on
the island; what made it terrific was its privacy. We pulled up at a
little hut next to a locked gate; the man on duty inside nodded,
unlocked the gate, and gave us a free, personal guided tour. We had the
whole place — mosaic floors, a couple of huge amphorae rooted into the
soil, the ancient aqueduct, the church complete with its own saint
entombed in the crypt — to ourselves.
We also spent time hiking the area around the agriturismo. We climbed
past the fig and citrus trees clustered near the farm buildings, entered
a cork forest, wound through an olive grove, then headed into the beech
and oak forest, with bells from unseen goats sounding in the distance
like a Balinese orchestra. We found a porcupine quill, collected slabs
of cork and picked wild blackberries, and were stopped in our tracks by
the thunder of a herd of free-ranging sheep we’d frightened. Back at the
farm, hot and dusty, we plunged into the swimming pool and gazed into
the staggering vaults of space across the summer-sweltering valley to
the opposite slopes.
But of course the purpose of the trip was to see where my paternal
great-grandparents had come from. San Pier Niceto ranges like a serpent
along a mountain ridge. From its church towers you have views out to the
sea and the ghostly hulks of the Aeolian islands. All of the narrow,
stacked houses fall on one side or the other of the town’s main drag,
Corso Italia. Mario Italiano, who had offered to assist me, had
suggested a late-afternoon meeting. We showed up at his house, right on
the main road, at 5. He stepped out of his front door as we pulled up.
Mario turned out to be an exuberant 59-year-old accountant who serves as
unofficial town historian. He welcomed us into his neat little house.
His wife, Maria, crushed some ice, whisked sugar and fresh lemon into
it, and we all sat down to refreshments at the dining table while “Say
Yes to the Dress” played on the TV in the background and Mario gushed
about the town, its history and traditions.
Mario presented me with a folder. He’d done a good bit of research,
including finding the birth certificates of both of my
great-grandparents. Then he led us on a remarkable procession through
the town. People joined along the way, so that eventually we included
his daughter, Grazia; his son Salvatore; a nephew, also Salvatore; his
son Alberto; Alberto’s girlfriend; and others. As we walked along Corso
Italia, Mario literally stopped before every person we passed and
explained what we were doing. He began each encounter by pointing to my 3
½-year-old son, Anthony, and saying, “Questo è Antonio Sciotto!” as if
expecting the town’s inhabitants to gaze in astonishment at a fabled
long-lost son.
We met at least two Sciottos during our little parade. One woman told me
her mother was named Sarah Sciotto. My father has an aunt named Sarah
Shorto. Since first names are heavily recycled in Sicilian families, we
agreed that we were probably related. An old man named Francesco
Sciotto, who was sitting on a bench along the town’s central piazza,
told me of his relatives who had emigrated to America. Sciottos, I
learned, were also spread out around the region. One branch had spawned
lawyers; two nearby towns had recently had Sciottos as mayors. It seemed
that long ago there had been a dynasty of sorts called Lo Sciotto,
which was affiliated with the town of Pace del Mela, six miles from San
Pier Niceto, where there is a Palazzo Lo Sciotto.
My ancestral town turned out to be a sweet, somnolent, pleasant place.
Its roots are deep: traditions and architectural remains date to the
Middle Ages, and its earliest settlement may have been in the third
century B.C. But the more recent story is one of steady depopulation,
starting in the late 1800s. It had around 8,000 residents at one time;
now the population is 3,000. Most who left emigrated to three places:
Venezuela, Canada and the United States. Of those who went to America,
it seems Pennsylvania and New Jersey were the most common destinations.
As darkness fell, Mario abruptly guided us into a doorway, and the next
thing we knew we were in a family kitchen. His wife, Maria, had gone
ahead of us and prepared a dinner at her mother’s house. It was loose,
informal, exactly the style of my extended family’s dinners at home.
People came and went. Joking taunts were shouted across the table.
Plates of pasta were handed around: macaroni alla Norma, with tomato
sauce and roasted eggplant. Salvatore, Mario’s nephew, told us he lives
in Switzerland most of the year, where he works in bars and has been
known to sing Red Hot Chili Peppers covers in a band. Maria’s mother
hovered in the background the way my grandmother used to at family
meals. For the secondo Maria produced breaded veal cutlets, which I was
astonished to find were almost exactly like my mother’s. It began to
dawn on me that my family culture — the loudness, the physicality, the
jokes, the food, the immediate familiarity toward others — was maybe not
so much Italian as specifically Sicilian. And the origins were here,
right here. It all felt bewilderingly and unexpectedly familiar.
Then we hit the street again. Mario had one final thing to show me. At
the far edge of town he stopped in front of a centuries-old stone house,
which had long been abandoned, and which looked out onto a patch of
farmland and toward the sea beyond. It hadn’t been hard to find, he
said, for the address was right there on the birth certificate. This
building was where my great-grandfather was born. It was the home of
Antonino Sciotto, who, after emigrating to Pennsylvania to work in the
coal mines, became Tony Shorto and gave rise to the world into which I
was born.
We stopped at a little bar on the way back and ordered gelati, which we
ate outside in the piazza where locals hold their political debates. It
was after 10, and the dark Sicilian night felt luxuriant.
In front of his house again, Mario Italiano told me I had to come back.
“When you do, you’ll know everybody in town!” I exchanged two kisses
with him, and thanked him as profusely as I could in my bumbling
Italian. My historical training had caused me to restrict my
expectations about what this investigation might yield. But I had gotten
two things from it: a gut feeling for the forces that had shaped me,
and an actual physical place in which to ground that feeling. I had
started my exploration as an almost academic exercise, a mere
intellectual puzzle. This generous man, and his love for his town, had
made it something more.
IF YOU GO
We stayed at the agriturismo Masseria Santa Mamma, masseriasantamamma.businesscatalyst.com, 12 miles from the town of Acquedolci. Information on agriturismo stays in Italy: agriturismo.it.
For pasta with swordfish and mint, visit Trattoria Antonio, Via Crocifisso in Taormina, (39 0942) 24570. And we had a nice meal at a seafood restaurant/wine bar on the coast called La Perla Nera, Fonderia 14, Marina di Patti, Patti, (39-0941) 362284.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/travel/digging-up-family-roots-in-sicily.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0
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