Later he apologizes to Rotella for embarrassing him. The delicacy he finds in the fierceness, the unstinting though not entirely easy hospitality, the clear-eyed dignity in hard times, the wild beauty of the mountains plunging near the sea, the emptiness of seaside tourist towns awaiting the season: these light up the book, along with the meals (the day after a prodigious Easter feast comes another one even more prodigious) and Giuseppe's traveling discourse.
Above all there is the sense of recognizing himself, two generations after his family emigrated, in an ancient, battered and resistant civilization. Pride and humility entwine all along the way.
A young man asks why Calabria should interest him. "We have nothing but sand and ocean." The author replies, "We have nothing but people and buildings and cars and terrible smells." Toward the end he writes of arranging to take Italian citizenship. What ensues is a far-fetched comic conspiracy with a woman at the Italian Consulate in New York, eager to help him get around a whole prickly string of Catch-22s to make it possible.
Rotella does not seem to be a practiced writer. There are awkwardnesses -- a prolonged comparison of oft-invaded Calabria to a prostitute -- but these are overcome by a determinedly seeking sensibility that lifts beyond determination into the inspired.
I like the quiet night scenes at the end of the packed days, when he seems almost literally to be putting his Calabrian villages to bed.
And what ordinary travel writer would stop to render a Good Friday Passion verse sung by shopgirls in Abereschsh, an Italo-Albanian dialect, and follow with Albanian, Italian and English translations? The last:
Christ heard rumblings
and could not rest
it was Judas the traitor
with all his host.
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