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m e m o r y
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Two Italian Gardeners
from Mussolini’s Italy
r e d w o o d c i t y , c a l i f o r n i a , a n d l e v e r e t t , m a s s a c h u s e t t s
Maska Pellegrini stands holding open the kitchen door. “Come
in, come in,” she says. “You must be tired. Are you hungry?
Would you like some coffee and cookies? Sit down, please.”
She is eighty-five, firm of step, with a wide, beautiful smile,
clear blue eyes, and a quick, dry wit. Her white hair frames her
face in soft waves as she looks me straight in the eye. Her hand-
shake is warm and strong when I introduce myself.
I’d called to say I would be late. Though I lived only two
towns away during the 1980s, I got lost in familiar territory,
searching for Maska’s street in Redwood City, a dense suburb
twenty-five miles south of San Francisco on the peninsula be-
tween the Pacific Ocean and the bay. I was distracted, having
driven up Route 280 from San Jose, where I’d visited my mother
for her birthday. She had just turned eighty-six. She lived in a
group home now, having succumbed to severe dementia. Though
I would not know it for three months, the day I went to meet
Maska would be the last day I ever saw my mother alive.
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Each time I flew back to California in the aftermath of my
mother’s death, I would visit Maska and Mario Pellegrini. Maska
is from the Veneto and Mario from Tuscany. Back east, between
visits with the Pellegrinis, I began to meet with Tullio Inglese, an
ecoarchitect in Leverett, Massachusetts, who had been raised as a
shepherd in a remote village that faced one of the most imposing
mountains of the Apennines east of Rome, La Maiella. Meeting
these Italian immigrants just as I was losing my mother, hearing
stories of traditional rural life in Italy, of lives irrevocably changed
by the politics and poverty that compelled them to leave, and
hearing what it was like to come to America and become Ameri-
cans was like encountering the ghost of my family’s past. It gave
the writing of these two stories an inescapable elegiac quality.
My conversations with Maska, Mario, and Tullio became a kind
of ritual of exchange. I would ask questions and listen; they would
answer both my questions and my unspoken need to hear any-
thing that might help me imagine my family’s origins.
Maska Pellegrini is from the north; Tullio Inglese is from
the south. Maska left Italy as Mussolini was consolidating his
power, Tullio in the wake of his bloody and ignominious defeat.
Maska’s mother took the family to join her husband in Califor-
nia; Tullio and his father came to join his mother just outside
Boston. Tullio’s family, like mine, knew only their local dialect;
Maska’s family learned to speak high Italian. Both remember
coming through Ellis Island.
To arrive in the United States was to become a stranger, to
America and to themselves as people moving between nations
and cultures. To garden was to become American on their own
terms, a symbolic as well as a practical gesture. To garden was to
keep alive parts of themselves that could not be known here,
could not be experienced as present here in any other way. Their
gardens represent distinct ways of embodying the memory of the
Italian landscapes that shaped them.
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Maska and Mario Pellegrini
As I close the gate behind me and walk toward Maska and Mario
Pellegrini’s house, the line of fat, blooming roses down one side
of the driveway feels comforting and familiar. I grew up in a
house surrounded by roses. On summer mornings when I was a
girl, my mother would go out the back door in her nightgown,
an old Easter basket on one arm, and walk the perimeter of our
yard, cutting roses with her long-handled shears. Fat bouquets
spilled petals of pink, white, lavender, yellow, flaming orange, or
dark red onto the dining room tablecloth, filling the air around
them with clouds of sweetness. On Friday nights she would send
me outside with a dinner plate piled with fishbones to bury under
the bushes, which were taller than I was. We inherited our roses
when we bought the house, several miles inland from the old
beach town where I’d grown up within walking distance of my
Italian grandfather’s house, and we let them go wild, sprawling
over the fence, their canes growing fat, their bark thickening, and
their thorns growing long and fierce.
Here at the Pellegrinis’, the bushes have been pruned to hold
their graceful vaselike shapes. Their green leaves shine, and the
soil beneath them is dark and crumbly.
“Please, sit,” Maska says as I enter her kitchen. “Then we will
look at the garden.”
You can’t see the complex world that is Maska and Mario Pel-
legrini’s garden from the road. Out front, a single redwood tow-
ers over the yard, where one mature orange tree and a crepe
myrtle grow in a small area surrounded by hedges.
Maska puts a plate of homemade almond biscotti before me.
The little metal percolator on the gas stove soon begins to pulse
as the jet of water in the glass knob on top turns a dark, rich
brown and the air fills with the aroma of freshly brewing coffee.
The smell of coffee stirs memories of other visits, other plates
of sweets. On sunlit days when he came down to the shore in his
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three-piece suit to play the horses at Monmouth Park Race
Track, my great-uncle, Giro Iannaconi the casket maker, would
arrive from Jersey City, a feather in the satin band of his fedora,
with a square white box of Italian pastry tied up in red and white
string—canoli, pasticiotti, sfogliatelli. It was my job to put the
coffee on and run to the door to greet him. My mother always
put out her finest china—fragile cups with delicately curved han-
dles, fine wide saucers, and cake plates, each with a single red
rose at the center.
When Maska sits down across from me, she smiles then says
my last name aloud softly. “What is that?” she asks.
“It’s German,” I say, explaining that my father was half Ger-
man and half Welsh. His mother, Gwladys Thomas, came here
from Wales as a girl in 1907. It was my mother’s parents who
came from Italy—from Caserta, near Naples.
“Ah, Caserta,” Maska says, nodding as she puts a folded nap-
kin beside my plate. Then she asks me mother’s maiden name.
“Natale,” I say.
“Natale. Oh, Christmas. Third generation, you are. Well, I’m
glad that you feel the way you do, because it’s quite important.
Yes, it is. I know my daughter feels so much like that too—she’s
proud of being Italian. When I came over here, I was ashamed to
be Italian,” she says, pausing, “because . . . just being Italian, we
weren’t welcomed.” How carefully she phrases it, like a guest
who remembers being treated rudely. “It was the same way Mex-
icans are treated right now. That’s the way we were treated. Ev-
erybody goes through the same feeling. It’s the same struggle for
all of us.”
When Maska came to the United States, she was part of the
largest migration from a single nation in modern history. To na-
tivists eager to defend America’s mythic Anglo-Saxon origins,
the millions of southern and eastern European immigrants who
arrived between the 1880s and the 1920s represented the threat
of cultural dilution by “darker races.”
“What was it like to come to America?” I ask.
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“It’s a sad thing . . . ,” Maska says, then pauses, unsure
whether to begin with the moment of departure and loss or the
moment of arrival and reunion. She draws a breath and starts
again. “It’s a great thing to come to America. But then to leave
everybody behind . . .” She shakes her head, her voice dropping.
“It was sad, very, very sad.
“We were brought in by my father. He came over in 1921 and
settled in Los Gatos. My aunt was there, and his cousin. That’s
the way it was at that time—one called the other. He worked and
worked and became a citizen. You had to be here five years to be
able to call the family. We came in ’27, all except my brother and
my oldest sister. He had to serve in the military before he could
come. My sister was in love and got married the day after we left.
But she met us in Genoa, and we said goodbye there. It was a real
sad parting. Real, real sad. Especially to leave my grandparents,
because we knew we probably wouldn’t see them again. And we
never did.
“We came from Veneto,” Maska says, “from Tolmezzo, about
twenty miles from Austria and Yugoslavia, maybe a little bit
more. We are on the triangle. It’s a beautiful area, but at that time
it was very poor. My father had to go abroad to work because
there was no work in Italy at all. I think I saw my dad three times
before I was seven.” And then not again for six years. Coming to
America meant the family could live together for the first time.
“My mother had to work in the fields all the time, so it was my
grandmother, Angela, my father’s mother, who took care of us.
She was Compado, her maiden name. My grandfather was Val-
entino Pillanini. Those were the two who lived with us, so when
we left them I felt that the whole world would just end.”
Here is the immigrant’s sorrowful knowledge—that worlds
end, relationships cultivated over generations can be severed in a
moment, and the place you know yourself by can vanish, as if it
is leaving you, though you are the one who is going away. Does
Maska remember leaving Italy?
“Just like now,” Maska says with energy. “We took the train
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to Genoa. We had never been to a city. Then we went to a hotel.
It was right above the statue of Columbus. So we took the ship.
It was in December. We had such bad weather. It was stormy,
stormy, all the way through. We landed in New York, then came
across with the train. In those days they had some kind of a . . .
Oh, I’m sorry. What are they called—the people that ring the
bells around Christmas?” she asks. “What are those?”
“The Salvation Army?” I offer.
“Yes, something like that. And then we got off in Chicago.
Took another train. And there were all these Salvation Army
people in their uniforms. Oh, they were great. They knew we
were coming and they would wait for us every time the train
stopped. They would pick us up and bring us to another train.
We couldn’t have done anything else without them. We would
have probably gone to South America or something.” We laugh
together, Maska’s laughter a trill of three sweet, high notes.
“I don’t know if they still do it—do you think they still do
that for immigrants?”
Her question fills me with sadness. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Anyway, we got here. The train came to Oakland.”
“And was your dad there to meet you?”
“Oh, yes. I can still see my dad with his overcoat. I could see
him in the corner, waiting for us. And it was just the most won-
derful thing that I can ever remember, seeing him there. He still
had the coat that he had taken from Italy. And he had a car, mind
you, a Ford. And for us, you know, it was never mind—a wheel-
barrow, fine—but not a car, okay? He took us all the way from
Oakland to San Jose to Los Gatos.
“Papa had everything ready,” Maska continues, seeing it all
still with the eyes of a young girl. “He had rented a nice home for
us. It was very comfortable, all furnished, with all the food ready,
so we arrived and we ate. He even had friends there ready for us.
We thought, ‘My gosh, this is heaven!’” she says, opening her
hands wide. America, the Promised Land.
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“Yes,” she says, sighing, “I think that was the best moment of
my life, actually, yes. I was thirteen. It was the best birthday pres-
ent I ever had. Thanks to my father. That he sacrificed six years,
seven years, here by himself. Yes. Strong. Like all immigrants,
you know?
“In Los Gatos we had a nice piece of land and we grew every-
thing. We had a windmill too, for water. They even delayed the
beginning of the school year so that children could go pick food
in the farms. To help their families, you know. And now you
don’t see a farm anywhere in the Santa Clara Valley. It’s terrible.
It was so beautiful then. In the spring, when the fruit trees were in
bloom, there would be so many blossoms, it looked like snow.
There was no place like Los Gatos. It was America for us. You
know, the real meaning of America. You go to America, you’ll
just be the happiest person. You’ll have everything you want.
And like they say, you just shake the dollars from the trees.”
Maska laughs her beautiful high laugh and then says seri-
ously, “But it’s not true. No. My father was a worker. A mason. He was just so proud to have us here. He wanted us to speak Ital-
ian and also try to speak the English. In Italy we just spoke the
dialect, which is like another language. It’s got a little bit of ev-
erything in it. Mario used to get so angry when I’d speak it, be-
cause he couldn’t understand. Wanting to be really American,
my father wanted us to learn quick. We’d all sit at the table every
night. They would make us study, my parents. He tried to teach
my mother. He wanted her to be modern. But she couldn’t at
first, because she was shy. Up north, in the Veneto, we are very
shy. Not like the Tuscani—they’re quick. It was so hard for her.
She didn’t know the language, and she wore different clothes.
You know, over there she used to wear these long skirts with the
blouse tucked in at the waist. She’d worked hard in the fields. She
got up to milk the cows at five, five-thirty, and then cleaned the
stalls, brought up the manure in the wheelbarrow.”
In six years Maska’s father had adjusted to America. He had
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become fluent in English and learned to drive a car. He dressed
like an American and was used to handling American money. He
had earned his citizenship. Now Maska’s parents inhabited two
different worlds. Her mother was still a rural peasant while her
father had become a modern American. Hers was the old world
and his the new.
“My mom was Maria Picottini. My dad was Pillanini—Giu-
seppe, of course,” Maska says, laughing. “And now I’m Pelle-
grini—not too far,” she adds, as if names are like countries and
can share borders. “Almost the same, except with the g there.” “Your first name sounds Russian,” I say.
“Yes, it is,” she says. “My dad was quite a reader. And he
picked it up from a book. Across Siberia was the title. Actually, maybe it was Masha, and he made it Italian, Masca. But I changed
it with a k. To give it a little more zip,” she says, laughing. Her son and daughter have Russian names, as well—Ivano and Sonya
—chosen from the work of her favorite Russian writer, Tolstoy.
“You came in 1927.” I’ve been waiting for the moment to ask.
“Were you aware of the Sacco and Vanzetti case?”
“Yes,” she says with great feeling. “From my father. Because
he was so very much against them being executed.”
As I tell Maska the story of Vanzetti’s garden and how I came
to it through a photograph of my mother taken on the last day of
Sacco and Vanzetti’s lives, August 22, 1927, she listens gravely.
“I’ll show you a picture,” she says, rising from the table to
lead me into a study off the kitchen. A charcoal drawing sev-
eral feet wide and high hangs on the wall, three vignettes drawn
from photographs. One of her nephews drew it as a gift for her
father. “This is my dad, all these three,” she says. On the left
a distinguished-looking man in shirtsleeves leans over a desk,
wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, a book open before him. “He
was quite an intellectual,” Maska explains. “Up to third grade,
that’s all they went. The rest was just self-taught.” Giuseppe Pil-
lanini read everything—history, literature, politics, philosophy.
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He read in Italian and in English. In the long years he spent work-
ing in Germany and Austria, he had learned about other cultures,
had begun to pick up other languages. He knew what was hap-
pening in the larger world.
In the middle, he wears a topcoat and hat. A woman in a long
coat, a soft hat, and good shoes stands close beside him, her arm
drawn through his. “This is my mom. This was the day they left
to go to Italy in 1949. They went back to see my sister. I made her
the coat.” They are prosperous Italian Americans now.
To the right her father appears again, this time in work clothes,
leaning over a board spread across two sawhorses, a hammer
in his hand. “These are his tools,” Maska says, pointing to his
workbelt and the bag near his feet. Work and the dignity of work
define this family’s heritage—and the belief that there is no nec-
essary conflict between the life of the mind and working with
one’s hands.
At the center of the huge drawing, above the image of her par-
ents preparing for their first return to Italy, loom the faces of two
Italian immigrants who fought for the right to a just wage and
decent working conditions for the working class—in America,
the class that has always included millions of new immigrants
—Nicolo Sacco, his gaze full of sorrow, and Bartolomeo Van-
zetti, with his drooping mustache and eyes that blaze with
defiance. The drawing captures one of the most famous photo-
graphs of the two condemned Italian anarchists: they are hand-
cuffed together, dressed formally in dark suits, and seated on
straight-backed wooden chairs. Just below their likenesses Mas-
ka’s nephew has drawn another famous image from the summer
of 1927, a group of protestors carrying placards that read sacco and vanzetti must not die!
“That was a terrible time for immigrants,” I say.
“Oh yes, it was,” Maska agrees. “It showed right there,” she
says, pointing to the two prisoners staring back at us. “That
didn’t soften their hearts, didn’t soften their minds, nothing.”
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Mario Pellegrini has come in the back door. He stands at the
threshold of the kitchen and calls out teasingly, “Is this the lost
lady?”
“Yes, this is the lost lady,” Maska says in a tone meant to quiet
him.
He comes to the doorway to the den. “What are you looking
for?” he asks me gruffly, his eyes twinkling. He is a compact man
with a shock of white hair. His baggy jeans are held up by wide
suspenders.
“She remembers Sacco Vanzetti,” Maska says quietly, their
iconic names bound together as one, in the manner most Italian
immigrants still speak of them.
Mario nods and says nothing, his face serious. In a moment
we hear the kitchen door open and close as he goes back outside.
“You know, my father was an anarchist,” Maska says. “Not
a communist, because anarchists and communists didn’t get
along, you know. There was quite a group in Los Gatos. What
was that paper that Papa used to get? L’Adunata—that’s it. He read it every day. I remember one of the gentlemen and his wife,
Aurora, who were the editors. I used to go to the opera with their
daughter.”
L’Adunata dei Refrattari, “Gathering of the Recalcitrants,” was the longest-running newspaper of the Italian anarchist move-
ment in America. It was published in New York from 1922 until
1971. L’Adunata published essays Vanzetti wrote in the Massa- chusetts jail where he learned English and kept up a voluminous
correspondence with supporters from all over the world.
Maska’s father had left Italy just as Mussolini was coming to
power and arrived in America at the height of the Red Scare, in
1920, the year Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested and put on trial
for murder. What must he have thought, reading the news from
home, as Fascist Italy became a prison, watching as his adopted
country offered up two Italian anarchists to the irrational fear
that marks this period as a historic low point in the history of
civil liberties in America.
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Giuseppe Pillanini’s years of working and waiting to bring his
family over were the same years that Sacco and Vanzetti spent
confined in separate prisons, when L’Adunata kept every detail of the case before its readers. Though America had not yet grown
into its democratic ideals, there could be no going back to Italy,
where by 1927 Mussolini had used every violent means neces-
sary to become dictator. The family’s only chance was in Amer-
ica, where Giuseppe encouraged them to learn high Italian, so
they could read their country’s great literature and pass on their
culture, while they strove to become American by learning En-
glish as quickly as possible.
Very gently, Maska asks, turning to face me after a long mo-
ment of silence, “Would you like to see the garden now?”
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Passing through the little wooden gate, I brush against a waist-
high shrub covered with tiny blue flowers, forgetting the sym-
bolic importance of thresholds until the pungent scent of the fine
green needles makes me stop and turn. Can this be rosemary?
I’ve never seen it grow so large. I pinch a sprig and sniff to be
sure. The herb of memory and fidelity, rosemary has been prized
for centuries for its power to heal and cleanse. Its presence re-
minds me that to be invited into a garden is to be ushered into a
private world. It is best done quietly, with humility, and with all
one’s senses alert.
A long path three feet wide divides the garden in two length-
wise. Side paths separate the front from the back, with a grape
arbor on the left and a toolshed midway down to the right. All
the paths are lined with large, square stepping stones that Mario
has made. He built the wooden forms and poured the cement,
dying some the color of terra cotta, leaving others a soft grayish
white. A neat square of dark earth alternates with each bright
stone, the perfect balance drawing the eye through the garden.
With Maska leading, we walk the paths slowly, the only
sounds our footsteps rustling the dry leaves, the birds calling, the
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light wind moving the tops of the redwoods and eucalyptus trees
at the edges of the property. Rectangular beds for the annuals,
all densely interplanted, are separated by the paths, so the space
feels like many small gardens. “Mario gets my ground ready,”
Maska says. “And I seed.” This is a collaborative garden, reflect-
ing both Mario’s tradition as a Tuscan and Maska’s as a Venetian.
The first bed to the left of the path is for the herbs and greens
and, just beyond them, the tomatoes. Beyond that, near the
fence, the Pellegrinis have planted three kinds of figs. A tall lad-
der stands beside a tree hung with ripe fruit. At ninety-three,
Mario still prunes, though they both do grafting. To the right
of the central path, Mario has created a small grove of trees—a
plum, a grafted apple tree full of green, red, and golden fruit, and
a persimmon. Small bushes line the fence, sagging under the
weight of cranberry beans. We pass a row of bright green Italian
flat-leaf parsley beside a row of dark green Genovese basil, its
sharply defined leaves contrasting with the ferny tops of carrots
and chioggia, white radishes from Italy, and the upright stems of green onions.
“Swiss chard,” Maska says, pointing. “Radicchio,” she con-
tinues, stopping.
Radicchio? But this is a row of loose heads of green leaves
that look like a hardy form of lettuce, perhaps romaine. Where is
the tight little bundle of dark red leaves that resembles a small
cabbage?
“We don’t like the red one,” Maska says with great firmness.
“We are green radicchio people.”
So few words to sum up a cultural heritage. She tears off a leaf
and hands it to me. It’s crisp, moist, and bitter. “Would you like
some?” she asks. And she leans down to cut, then hands me the
thick bunch of leaves.
Italian culture is defined by regions, each distinct for its di-
alect and cuisine. The Veneto is famous for its radicchio, a mem-
ber of the chicory family, but for the red varieties, not the green
ones that Maska loves. She grows two, with seeds brought from
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Italy years ago—Pan di Zucchero, or ‘Sugarloaf,’ and Zucche- rina di Trieste, ‘Sugar of Trieste,’ named for the cosmopolitan city on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, across from the Veneto.
Trieste, as Maska calls it, pronouncing the soft final e, is her fa- vorite. Its name suggests the mix of cultures that has influenced
her native landscape, dialect, and foodways. Once food for poor
folk, radicchio has become popular as an ingredient in fancy
American salads only in the past few decades. In the Veneto it
grows wild. Food is not about fashion for the Pellegrinis; it an-
swers a hunger for continuity. Food is a form of deep memory.
Through food they are linked to their native landscape, to its soil,
its water, and its trees.
In the corner of a nearby bed, one radicchio plant has been al-
lowed to bolt, and its white flowers are beginning to turn brown.
Soon it will set seed. Here and there throughout the garden, a
specimen of each herb and vegetable has been allowed to do the
same. Ungainly, they tilt under the weight of ripening seeds,
which Maska will not pick until they have dried in the pod.
Which seeds, I ask, has she been saving longest?
“Oh, golly, let me see. It would be the bush beans. We just call
them Italian beans, you know. I guess I’ve had those, let’s see,
sixty years, anyway.”
Sixty years ago it was common to save seeds; they were a
part of every harvest. Now people buy books to learn how—and
why—it is crucial to preserve them. For Maska, it is a given, part
of her culture. She thinks the first bush-bean seeds might have
been her mother’s, a gift when she married Mario nearly seventy
years ago.
How many kinds of time are represented in this garden? There
are fast greens that quickly replace leaves as they’re cut, like ra-
dicchio and lettuce; then the indeterminate tomato plants, whose
fruit ripens in succession; next, the slow root vegetables and le-
gumes, which are harvested only once. Slower still are the vines
—the kiwi, kumquat, and grape. And slowest of all are the fruit
and nut trees, and then the redwoods, thriving in a crowded
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suburban neighborhood, reminders of California’s vast natural
abundance. All around us, the garden is filled with life in every
stage of generation and decay—newly seeded beds, freshly
sprouted seedlings, maturing tomatoes, peppers, and beans; the
ripening fruit of apple and fig; the apricot and walnut trees
picked bare; the browning pods of specimen plants chosen to
bear a harvest for the longest stretch of time, seed time. How
fixed in linear time the nongardener can feel! But here, as Maska
and Mario work, the world is being born, ripening, and dying ev-
ery day, and they are part of it.
We pause near a bed filled with rows of gorgeous peppers—
green, yellow, and red—which glisten beside two rows of purple-
black eggplants, one the slender Japanese variety, the other “just
round,” as Maska says. “You want to take some peppers?” she asks. “I should have brought a bag.” As we stroll, she fills my
arms with food.
Strawberries. Chinese onions and tarragon. Thyme. Chinese
beans a foot long. Maska pauses to feel a drying pod, hoping
for a good harvest of seed. Then cucumbers, for making sweet-
and-sour pickles, which Maska will serve in winter with bolito,
boiled chicken and beef. And of course “more radicchio,” Maska
says, “because we have radicchio almost every night.”
Finocchio, green fennel, comes next. I pull the great feathery plume of its foliage through my hand, then press my open palm
to my nose, savoring the sharp scent of licorice. Its fat white bulb
shows just beneath the soil. “In my mother’s dialect it’s fenuc,” I say. “We ate it every Christmas.”
“Oh, really?” Maska turns to me, looking pleased.
This garden, on this day, releases deeply buried memories in
me. I think of my mother twenty miles down the road, parked in
front of a television in her wheelchair. She would love it here. Just
hearing Maska’s voice as she speaks the names of things in Ital-
ian would give her pleasure. I remember how hungrily she lis-
tened when a new girl whose family had just arrived from Italy
came to walk to school with me one morning. She greeted my
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mother with shy respect. When my mother heard the girl’s ac-
cent, she said something to her in Neapolitan dialect and received
an answer in Italian. “Oh!” my mother exclaimed. “You speak
high Italian!” And then she begged the new girl to speak to her in
alto italiano, literally “Italian of the north.” “These are the tools we’ve used all our lives,” Maska says,
drawing me back to the present as we pass the open door of
the shed.
“This little hoe?” I ask. It leans against the wall, its wooden
handle worn to a soft sheen.
“Oh, Mario made it.” How casually she says it, as if there
were nothing remarkable about this.
Behind the toolshed, a tall, slender-limbed kumquat bears its
small, bright fruit, miniature oval oranges that glow against the
cobalt sky. Beside it, a kiwi vine has woven itself through a trellis
Mario attached to the back of the shed. In a long rectangular bed
between the grove of fruit trees and the shed, pole beans have
been trained up hand-cut branches that stand in four lines of
twelve, long allées of bright green vines.
“And here, all volunteer tomatoes,” Maska says. “Cherry to-
matoes.” They’re growing around the bottom of a newly grafted
tree—three kinds of peach on a plum scion. “Mario would say,
‘Pull them up!’” she adds, pointing to the accidental tomatoes in-
side the hexagonal raised bed he has created for the young tree.
“But you can’t bear to?” I ask.
“No.” She shakes her head, smiling.
Maska grows at least nine kinds of tomatoes. Are any of them
heirloom varieties? My question clangs like a cracked bell. This is
no collector’s garden, and even if her seeds are of a fine old pedi-
gree, that’s not what matters to her. To accommodate me, she
muses her way through a list.
“Oh, let’s see . . .” she begins. She knows two by their com-
mon names. There’s Cuor di Bue,‘Beef Heart,’ as Maska calls it —her favorite. She likes it for its meatiness. It’s a good tomato
for sauce. Then there is the Roma, a full-sized red tomato for eat-
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ing and also good for sauce. After these two come the rows of the
anonymous: a large and a small variety of red cherry tomato and
a sturdy plant whose beautiful yellow pear tomatoes hang like
glowing lanterns. Next is one called simply “the Russian to-
mato,” perhaps in honor of the family tradition of reading Rus-
sian novelists and giving children Russian names. The last three
tomatoes are personal acquaintances: Dora, Joanna, and Harry,
each named for the person who gave Maska the seeds.
When Maska and Mario have eaten as many tomatoes as they
can and dispensed bags and baskets of them to kin, friends, and
neighbors, the canning begins in the back room off the kitchen.
Maska makes enough sauce to last all winter, of course, and more.
We are deep into the garden now. When I turn to look back
over my shoulder through the leaf-dappled light, I can see ten-
drils of grapevines curled like fine wire around the slender trunks
of trees Mario sank into the ground decades ago. The vines are
festooned with clusters of pale green grapes, and further down,
others that have turned a deep red.
“And these are boysenberries,” Maska says, walking slowly
on. “These I freeze. We don’t make jam with the boysenberries.
The children love them. We use them with crêpes.” She means
the great-grandchildren, the fourth generation to grow up in her
garden.
Every fall Maska and Mario peel and slice apples and drizzle
them with lemon juice before freezing them. They dry apricots
and figs on screens, just the way they dry the mushrooms they
bring back from Mount Shasta every autumn, a tradition of for-
aging that Maska brought from Italy. They cure forty to sixty
quarts of olives a year. They make apricot jam and fig jam, and
orange marmalade from the fruit of the tree out front.
We have reached the end of the path. On this end of the gar-
den shed, Mario has placed an old sink under the downspout “to
collect the rain,” Maska explains. Nothing is wasted here—not
light, not soil, not rain, food, time, or work.
Directly behind the shed are the compost bins. “Whatever I
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148
have from the kitchen,” Maska says, “I bring it down. We let it
stay until the spring, and then we pass it through the screen and
put it over there, so we’ll have it ready.” Composting is about pa-
tience; it’s a way of participating in the earth’s renewal of itself.
Across from the compost area is a stand of trees—an almond
and several figs. This year the squirrels got most of the almonds.
“But we don’t mind,” Maska says. “We share.”
It’s possible, standing here under a tall, widely branching fig
tree laden with ripe fruit, to forget where I am. “Do you feel as if
you’re in Italy when you’re back here?” I ask.
Maska’s answer surprises me. It is neither yes nor no. “I am
just in my own world,” she says. “I love it. I’m happy. Out here,
I’m in my glory. You know, sometimes I can’t even sleep thinking
of what I’m going to do the next day.” She is radiant, speaking of
her work. “I come down here, forget everything. Because every-
thing seems great when you’re touching the earth, you know. It’s
our life, you know. Do you want to see if we can find you a fig?”
she asks, her voice soft and low. “There’s one up there if you can
reach. Pull the branch down. If it’s soft, it’s good.”
The ripe fig comes away easily when I close my hand around
it. I split it open and sink my teeth into its pink flesh.
f
Later, as Maska prepares dinner, I ask Mario to tell me his story
of coming to America.
“My father came in 1904, by himself,” he says. “He met my
mother in Santa Cruz. She was from a village not too far from
where my father was from, in Tuscany. Near Lucca. She was a
waitress in an Italian restaurant over there at the port. They fell
in love, they got married. They didn’t speak any English at all.
They were just off the boat. Italiani.” Mario was born in Santa Cruz in 1908. “So we lived here
until the First World War,” he says. “Then right after the war,
in 1920, we went back to Italy. Then when I was seventeen years
old, I came back by myself. I came out here on account of Mus-
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149
solini. Mussolini wanted to make a Fascist out of me, and I
didn’t want to become one. I’m saying, ‘I’m going to America,
what do I want to become a Fascist for?’ So I got a beating. From
one of my friends I went to school with. He was a blackshirt. So
that put my arm in a sling for a couple of days.
“Before I left, I got him. I shouldn’t have done it, but I did it. I
was sitting on a chair in front of my father’s house. We had a lit-
tle place where people would all go out, sit at the bar, talk, you
know, in the summertime. All at once come the same kid that
helped knick my arm, and he tells my father, ‘Why don’t you go
to America together?’ And he knocked the hat off his head with a
stick, you know, a baton? Jeez, my father never said nothing. I
got up out of the chair I was sitting on and I went, boom! Like that.” Mario makes a right hook in the air. “Right here, I cut him
right through here,” he says, stroking his jaw. “I was lucky, be-
cause the cousin of the leader of the Fascist group was right there
with us and saw the whole thing, otherwise they would have
burned my father’s house and killed us all. Eight days later, I’m
on the ship coming back to the United States. I said ‘Goodbye!
Now you can take Italy all for yourself!’
“I have a lot of stories about those Fascists, and I’m not even
going to tell them to you, because I don’t want to get you sick.
Two brothers got killed because they were singing the communist
anthem. They killed them right on the street.”
“Italy went through a lot of dark times,” Maska adds quietly.
“It was like a religion,” she says, remembering the schoolchil-
dren in their little black uniforms. “They were indoctrinated very
young, and once they were indoctrinated, well, that was it, that
was the only way they would think. We never joined,” she says,
though she remembers how mesmerizing Mussolini’s oratory
could be, coming over the radio.
“I remember leaving very well,” Mario says, finishing his
story. “I can’t forget it. Nineteen twenty-five, I left my town. I
walked to Alto Pascio. My mother was the one who was hurt the
most when I left. My brothers didn’t give a hoot. They were just
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150
kids. My father took me to the train station. ‘Good luck. Go
shake the tree,’ he said. You know, if you were leaving for Amer-
ica they used to say, ‘Go shake the tree!’” Mario laughs hard, his
eyes closing as he remembers the joke.
“So I came back to America by myself. I didn’t have to stop
at Ellis Island this time, because I was born a citizen. I had the
citizen papers. I came right straight to California and I went to
work. I went to school, night school, to learn English. Then I
came down to Los Gatos, worked in the ranches. I did gardening,
I did orchard work, I learned to prune trees. I would just go with
somebody who would teach me what to do. I was a workman.”
Work: the theme of their lives, the dignity of labor, the skill to
fashion and use their own tools, the self-sufficiency of being able
to provide for nearly all their own needs with their own hands.
As Mario and I set the table, he begins to recite aloud a little
poem that begins “La matina ascendo . . .” His voice is soft now, musical. “In other words,” he says, “when the sun comes up in
the morning, it comes up to furnish us everything to eat.” Hom-
age to the sun—a poem to food. How Italian. Is this an old Tus-
can saying, or did Mario write it himself?
“Sometimes when I’m sitting down, I think of something,” he
says. “I get up and write it out. I’m a crazy guy.”
He hands me his notebook, and I read the next piece aloud.
“‘The clock of life is wound just once, and no man has the power
to tell just when the hands will stop . . . on what day, or what
hour. Now is the only time you have. So live it with a will. Don’t
wait until tomorrow, the hands may then be still.’”
“Crazy, isn’t it? But that’s the way I feel. When I want to ex-
press something, I just write the way I feel.”
“Mario, are you getting ready to die?” I ask.
“He’s been getting ready to die for twenty years,” Maska puts
in before he can answer. She’s in high spirits.
“I got news for you, when you get to my age . . . I can’t go
fishing, I can’t go hunting, I can’t do this and I can’t do that.
What the hell am I doing here?”
t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e
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“You’re taking care of the garden,” Maska says firmly.
“That’s the main thing.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m doing.”
Maska laughs at him, long and hard. “Oh, you’re just too
funny, Mario.”
“Maybe we should just put you in the compost heap, Mario,”
I say. “What do you think?”
“That would be good too,” Mario says, enjoying the tease.
“Forget it,” Maska says, her voice now firm. “When it comes,
it comes, that’s all.”
“Well, we got to talk about it before we go. We’ve got to say
something,” Mario says, an edge to his voice.
Maska gets up to finish cooking. The water has come to a
rolling boil, and now she lowers into it the gnocchi she rolled and
scored by hand in preparation for my visit, a traditional northern
Italian dish. She will serve the gnocchi with fresh pesto, aspar-
agus, home-cured olives, and a big salad from the garden. The
only thing on the table the Pellegrinis haven’t prepared them-
selves is the wine.
We take our places. “Okay, buon appetito!” Maska says, and we lift our glasses.
“She drinks plainly what comes out of the sky—water,” Ma-
rio recites, inspired, nodding to Maska. “Patricia, my time is up!
My lifeline is going now, so let’s have a drink!” With great cere-
mony, he clinks his glass against mine. “Salute!” “Salute!” Maska says, lifting her glass of water to ours filled
with wine.
Tullio Inglese
Tullio Inglese and I stand on the roof of his newly built house
looking down over the garden. Below us lies a landscape defined
by rocks.
“Leverett is a very stony place,” he explains, “so much so that
we may have to import soil to fill the gardens. Every time I men-
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152
tion that to somebody in Italy, they can’t believe it. They never
moved, you know, from one village to the other. But when they
did move, what did they take with them? They took the soil from
their garden. They actually put the soil in baskets and carts and
took it to the next place. Because soil, which most people think
is this sort of neutral substance that’s magically there, isn’t, you
know—you build it up over the years.”
It’s an arresting image, carrying the earth with you as you go.
Tullio offers it casually, as if it didn’t have the power to shift our
understanding of what it means to live in relation to the land, to
restore to the garden its primal place in human culture and to the
gardener the role of culture-bearer.
This house in a clearing in the woods of western Massa-
chusetts, Tullio tells me, was designed to harvest rain as well as
sunlight. A water chain directs rainwater from the roof down
through a narrow bed of rocks into a large oval garden pool sur-
rounded by stones harvested from the site. As Tullio and his crew
moved the earth to construct the house and as Tullio prepared
the ground for the trees, the greenhouse, and the gardens, he kept
finding what looked like river rocks. Those rocks now line the
bed he has prepared for the rainwater flowing into the pond.
“This used to be part of the Connecticut River,” he explains.
Thousands of years ago, when Lake Hitchcock formed behind a
glacier and then released its tremendous force as the glacier
carved out the valley below, pieces of jagged ledge broke off and
were polished by the rushing water. Here and there in the land-
scape, Tullio has placed one of the smooth oval rocks on or near
a rough slab of ledge. The effect is subtle and pleasing, a mysteri-
ous source of tension in the fine balance struck between the culti-
vated portions of the landscape and the acres of undisturbed
woodland just beyond it.
Below us, where Tullio has selectively thinned the trees, the
terraced hillside draws the eye downward, toward a sweeping
view of the Pioneer Valley. Two asymmetrical stone paths, one
leading away from each of the glass doors that open onto a slat-
t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e
153
ted wooden walkway, converge halfway across the grass of the
first terrace, leading to the terrace below. Along the stone path-
ways and in the small triangular swaths of ground between them,
Tullio’s wife, Judith, an artist well known for her ceramic murals,
has begun to put in a perennial garden filled with flowers and
herbs. Just beyond her flower garden, Tullio has laid the founda-
tion for a sunken greenhouse, which he has surrounded on its
eastern and southern sides with a large vegetable garden already
full of ripening tomatoes, eggplants, lettuce, basil, parsley, pep-
pers, and onions.
“All the landscaping is edible,” he says as he points out the
pear, plum, and apple trees, slender saplings with delicate leaves.
These small and hopeful presences will fill the courtyard with
fragrance and the sound of bees when they flower next spring.
Before the house was built, when the land had been cleared and
the foundation poured, Tullio came up to the site and began
planting fruit trees. “I would have kept planting,” he says, “but
the ground began to freeze.”
At the far end of the main house, Tullio has built a trellis for
a newly planted kiwi vine. He has put in long, straight rows of
grapevines. There will be blueberries in the summer too, beyond
the grapes, just below the first terrace, where Tullio has filled the
spaces in the stone wall with soil so that ferns and wildflowers
have begun to seed themselves. Growing among the sun-warmed
rocks, they help prevent erosion by anchoring the wall to the
hillside.
On the broad terrace below the house and its gardens, Tullio
has created a fire pit. It was the first thing he built, he says, with
great flat slabs of rock in a circle around it. I’m struck by Tullio’s
choice. When he began to alter the landscape for human use, it
wasn’t the framing of a dwelling that came first but the clearing
of a place in the open for the primordial act of sitting together
around a fire. Only later, when I learn about his boyhood as a
shepherd in the mountains of Italy, will I understand what in-
spired this and so many other choices.
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What kind of garden is this? What kind of house and land-
scape? What is remembered here, and what restored?
All his life, Tullio Inglese has carried with him, as if carrying
the soil of his native ground, the story embodied in this land-
scape and this house.
f
“Remember,” Tullio says, “I came to the U.S. from Italy when I
was nine. I’m sixty-two now, so it was a while back.”
We sit in the loft of the old Wesley Chapel, which he and Ju-
dith bought for $30,000 in 1977, when it was scheduled to be de-
molished to make room for a parking lot. Pools of green, yellow,
and blue light form on the wooden floor while we talk, as sun-
light passes through the beautiful old stained glass windows.
Downstairs, outside the front door, hangs a flag bearing the im-
age of the earth seen from space, a cloud-wrapped blue, green,
and white sphere floating in inky darkness. This is where Tullio’s
ecologically oriented architectural firm, Nacul, its name drawn
from the words nature and culture, has its offices. It was here, leaning over his parchment, drawing by hand in meditative si-
lence, that Tullio conceived his new house and, stone by stone
and tree by tree, articulated changes in the landscape surround-
ing it. Only as he remembers his childhood as a shepherd in Italy
and the shock of returning decades later does the act of transmu-
tation that his new house and garden represent become clear.
“The chance for my parents to come happened when I was
only two months old,” he says, speaking of the difficult decision
his family made in the hope of establishing their right to emigrate
to America. “My mother came by herself, without me. My father
was in the army. That just devastated her. She obviously didn’t
want to leave, but she thought if she didn’t come, then we would
never be able to come. Remember, these people are not educated
and don’t know what’s going on in the world. So she did come.
And she lived here by herself. Imagine how close Italian families
are. So here’s my mother coming by herself, leaving her parents
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behind. It was very, very hard for her. I don’t think she ever got
over it. I was in Italy, raised by my aunt and my grandmother. My
uncles and father were all in the army. I didn’t see my father until
I was about eight years old.”
It was 1938 when Tullio’s mother sailed to America. Mus-
solini had been in power for sixteen years. Fascist Italy was en-
gaged in endless wars meant to restore the nation to the glory of
imperial Rome. Though Tullio grew up in a remote village, there
was no escaping military service for his father. All the young men
—shepherds and farmers—were conscripted and sent abroad.
“They didn’t have a choice. If you’re not educated, you don’t
have a perspective on life. You’re basically a farmer, and if some
authority comes and says to you, ‘You go in the army,’ you go in
the army, period. If you didn’t go, you went to jail, or something
bad happened to you.
“I still have vivid, absolutely vivid memories. We had sheep.
The sheep were rather precious. They were meat, they were
wool, and they were even milk, for the cheese. Even I, as a very
young boy, five, six years old, would be out grazing sheep in
the mountains. Roccacaramanico was a very, very mountainous
place—a gorgeous, gorgeous place. The village faced La Maiella.
And Marrone was the mountain just behind us. My dog was a
big white Maremma—a protective dog bred only in Abruzzi. He
had a spiked collar in case he got in a fight with other big dogs or
with the wolves that used to try to get the sheep. Beautiful dog. I
remember him extremely well—Leone, Lion,” Tullio says, grow-
ing thoughtful, his gaze distant as he remembers.
“There were times when we were grazing sheep higher on the
mountains. You didn’t go home that night, you stayed out. You
could get under rocks to stay warm. They had tents. Not fancy
tents, cloth tents they would set up. On a few occasions I would
be left there alone. I believe they did it as a rite of passage. It
was a scary, lonely experience. If I didn’t have that dog sitting
there . . .”
He does not finish the sentence. Tullio was six years old the
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first night he was left to tend the flock of sheep alone. Everything
he wore—his shirt, his trousers, his shoes, and the blankets that
kept him warm—had been made by hand by people he knew.
“I remember seeing the women spin the yarn and do their
own weaving. They made all their own clothes. They made their
own shoes. Very fancy shoes. There was nothing we didn’t make.
Remember, the town had no money. So you basically did every-
thing yourself. There was a communal bakery, a communal mill.
And you brought the grain to the mill, and they would grind it
for you and you’d bring it home in a sack, the flour. When you
made your bread, if you didn’t have a baking oven, a masonry
one, outside or inside your house, you’d bring it to a communal
bakery. There was one in town. That’s where women used to go
and bake bread and visit and talk.
“Usually every family had at least one pig, which they slaugh-
tered in the winter, since they had no refrigeration. Keeping the
animal alive was the way that the meat was preserved until you
needed it. So in winter, you ate some meat, but that was it—not
much meat at all. But then we’d have a big feast. They may have
dried some meat, used the rest for sausages. We grew fruits, veg-
etables, everything. I grew up knowing how to keep the soil.”
When all the able-bodied men were called up, the women held
the village together, gardening and farming, taking care of the
cows and sheep. Tullio’s aunt Bambina carried him out to the
fields in a basket, just as Maska’s sister Angelina had carried her,
so the family was always together.
“I was always outside. There were cousins working with us
too. The village was one big family. It really was. People sang
when they worked outside—I remember the women working,
hearing them singing.” “Chiesa nelle Alpi,” Tullio says, “Church in the Alps,” or “Di Fiori,” “A Bunch of Flowers”—songs of broken hearts and lost love. “And then the women would bring
food out there. Some men who didn’t go in the army, older men,
they’d be working in the fields too. At lunchtime, someone would
come out with food—bread and cheese—and they’d all sit down.
t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e
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“The potato fields were on the slopes of the mountains be-
cause they didn’t use the best land for potatoes—potatoes can
grow anywhere—so they’d dig them up with this tool with two
points on it. We called it a zap, short for zappore, ‘to work.’ I have one in the barn. I can show it to you later. I remember that
sound echoing over the valley. We were surrounded by moun-
tains, so any sound was very apparent, you know. The soil was so
old and worn, there was nothing left there. They’d have to distin-
guish rocks from potatoes. There were hardly any trees left there
for the fire.
“You couldn’t drive there,” he says. “You can imagine how
beautiful and quiet it must be. So here’s this rather idyllic place.
But we had no conveniences—no bathroom, no running water,
no stove, no electricity, nothing. Then suddenly, one time, up the
road are coming tanks.” They heard the sound of metal against
metal—a strange and foreign noise, as if all the villagers were
striking the stony mountainside with their zaps at the same time.
It was a German panzer unit arriving to occupy the village.
“They were in the process of retreating from southern Italy back
to Germany,” Tullio explains, “right at the end of the war—I was
around six or seven. They occupied the village for six months,
during one whole winter.
“They hardly had any food, so you can’t blame them, but they
took all the livestock, butchered all the livestock. My grand-
mother hid a pig behind the woodpile in the barn. You’d look at
the wood and think it was against the wall, but actually there
was a space behind it. She had the pig back there. She’d have to
take the wood down to go feed it. One time the Germans found
it—they were in the barn, the pig made a sound. They butchered
the pig. They made a big demonstration of it—butchered it in
front of our house, actually. They took our milking goat. They
took everything. They didn’t understand that they should leave
some animals so we could live, or for the future. They were des-
perate, really desperate. I don’t have any bad feelings about it. It
was a condition of the war. That’s what it does to you.
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“During the winter people still had beans, dried beans they’d
hidden away, stashed, and dried corn. So they still had a few
things. They actually ate some of their pets. The Germans took
over some houses and a municipal building—there was only one
in town. They took over the church. The municipal building be-
came their headquarters. They set up barracks in there, bunks. I
remember them well, even though I was very young. They were
okay to children. I’ve always been afraid to ask how they were to
the women. I didn’t want to ask my aunt. I just didn’t want to
know. But I think some bad things could have happened.
“In the spring the Germans left. And then we heard that the
war was over, that there was a treaty signed, that Germany and
Japan had surrendered. And of course Italy was surrendering. I
remember there was a big party one night, because it kept me up
—they were shooting guns outside our window, celebrating, fir-
ing up in the air.”
Sometime in 1946, Achille Inglese made his way back to Roc-
cacaramanico. “My father finally came home when I was eight,”
Tullio remembers. “I was sleeping in the same room with my
grandmother, in the same bed, and then I just remember suddenly
there was a man sleeping in there as well, and they said that he
was my father. But it didn’t mean something specific to me.”
Tullio had always been told that one day he would make the
journey to America, where the mother he could not remember
was waiting for him. So one year after his father returned from
the war, he left the grandmother and aunt who had raised him.
“Leaving the village was devastating,” he says. “I was told we
were going to be leaving soon, but it’s not the way we leave now.
We leave now knowing we’ll see that person again, because you
can fly anyplace now. Leaving then was knowing you would
never see each other again, absolutely never. My grandfather
died just previous to our leaving. My grandmother didn’t want
to come. Leaving her there, and my Aunt Bambina, and all my
friends, knowing that I’d never see any of them again—and I
didn’t—that was really hard.
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“And leaving my donkey! Your donkey is not just your don-
key, you know, it’s your pet. Bruno, he was quite a character.
Stubborn guy, but nevertheless . . . And a dog is not just a dog, it’s
an animal that has protected you. It’s the watchdog, tough. One
time my father left a piece of rope in the field by accident, and
Leone didn’t come home for two days. My father decided that he
must be still out in the field, so he went there. And the dog was
guarding the piece of rope, without eating or drinking. He fig-
ured my father would come back. Property was so precious. A
piece of rope—you don’t just go buy a piece of rope. Leone was a
dedicated dog. He was willing to die for you. He never came into
the house. Then, the night before we left, he picked himself up
from the barn. Now, the barn was not near the house, it was on
the other side of the village, on the outskirts. So Leone walked to
the house and was sitting at the door and then came inside for the
first time. And nobody knew how he figured out that we were
leaving. When my father saw him there, he just started bawling.
“So it was just my father and me when we left. My father
told me, ‘We’re going to take a truck, go to Naples, take a ship,
and go see Mama in America.’ We just walked a ways down the
mountain till the truck could come for us, and then we got on
the truck. There were no vehicles in the village. Not even a bicy-
cle, nothing. We brought very few belongings. Just one bag, not
much. We had some cheese. It was in pretty tough shape by the
time we ate it. Stored in warm places—it was full of maggots. I
remember my father eating the cheese anyway. I couldn’t touch
it, but he said, ‘Oh, maggots, that’s too bad.’ The truck took us
right to the docks, where there was a pensione. We stayed over- night. Naples was my first city. I’d never seen so many people in
one place, never been in a place that had a bathroom with a flush-
ing toilet and running water.
“We took a boat, a U.S. Marine transport ship called the Ma- rine Shark. I still remember it—a small boat carrying a battalion of Marines going back to Texas. They were all very tall. Up to
then, I’d never seen an American, never heard an English or
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American word spoken. Of course, we didn’t understand English
anyway, but trying to understand them—forget it. I’d never seen
the ocean, or any water. Never been on a boat before. It was
pretty traumatic. Of course we got seasick. We went out on the
Mediterranean. I remember passing the Rock of Gibraltar. It’s a
very narrow strait, and you know that once you get beyond that
point, that’s it, you’re out on the ocean. It was scary. My dad was
consoling. He had been home only about a year. I’d never really
known him before that. Tata, that’s what I called him. That’s our
dialect.”
Days later, when the boat came within sight of the Statue of
Liberty, Tullio’s father called him to the railing to see. For years
Tullio had imagined America, but not like this. “Americans were
blond, blue-eyed people dressed in flowing robes, which might
have been lavender and blue and white,” he says. “America was
heaven, the same as heaven. But then, coming into New York and
seeing smoke and chimneys was not in keeping with my vision at
all. I told my father, ‘This can’t be the right place. It’s not white.
This place is smoky and dirty and dark.’ And my father said,
‘What did you think—did you think you were going to paradise
or something?’ I still remember that,” he says, laughing. “I said,
‘Yeah, I thought I was.’
“My mother was there to meet us. I remember that clearly,
seeing her there, in that place at Ellis Island where you wait to
go and be greeted by your family, and my father saying as we
approached her, ‘Now make sure you hug and kiss her and say
‘Mama,’ because that’s your mother.’ He had to convince me
that I’d better be friendly and loving and call her that, which I
couldn’t do. For close to a year I called my mother Zia, which
means ‘aunt.’ I don’t think she liked that very much. The only
person in America I really knew was my father.
“We stayed in New York for a few weeks, to acclimate, you
know—just kind of be here.” Then they moved to a town just
outside Boston, an Italian enclave within easy reach of the North
End. “It was a rather urban place, Cottage Street, right on the
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Watertown-Cambridge line. We lived in a basement, literally.
Not a basement apartment but a basement, we were so poor. It
meant sleeping next to the furnace. Just a couple of tiny windows
—those high basement windows. The sink was a utility sink, and
that was it. We lived in one room. There was a blanket between
my bed and my parents’ bed, just hanging on a pipe. That’s
where we lived. A couple of years of that. Possibly three.
“There was a parking area outside the basement that wasn’t
being used. One day my father ripped up the asphalt with a pick
and shovel. There was pretty good soil underneath, it turned out.
He dug it up, and before you know it he had this incredible gar-
den. It wasn’t a big garden. He planted intensively, so he’d have
one thing growing into another. I used to carry the water out to
the garden in old tin cans. He had zucchini, a lot of tomatoes. All
the lettuces. Radicchio. Basil, a lot of other herbs. And Romano
beans, which you couldn’t buy anywhere then. They’re big, but
you eat the entire bean. They’re wide and flat. You take off the
string, cut the ends slightly, and boil them to tenderize them.
Then you can cook them in olive oil and garlic. They’re great.
“He got his seeds from friends. They would go to each other’s
gardens and investigate and talk. If somebody’s crop—say, let-
tuce—didn’t do well, they’d give them some. There was a lot of
exchange. That was a gift they could give to their neighbors.
They never bought seeds. They didn’t spend money on the gar-
den. Otherwise, they thought they were defeating the whole pur-
pose of a garden. There was a fellow up the street who had a
slightly bigger garden who used to give away tomato seeds. And
then after that, once my father got it going, he propagated his
own tomatoes.
“Then we moved to another house in the same area, which
was only slightly bigger. But it had a piece of land next to it, so he
put in a slightly more substantial garden. He had a fig tree that he
covered in the winter, and grapevines on an arbor.” Each time
they moved, Tullio’s father would walk the yard, choosing the
best place for a garden.
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“He always made his own wine. He got the grape slips from
other Italians in the neighborhood. So when they visited some-
one, what did they bring? In the summer, you bring a bag of veg-
etables. Other times, you bring a gallon of wine. Not just a little
bottle, a whole gallon. He made three or four barrels of wine a
year. Each barrel was about forty gallons. Of course they drank
wine on a regular basis, but he would give wine away. I’d always
help him. We never bought wine, not until the last ten or twelve
years. He made his own wine press, he and a friend, with recy-
cled parts from the place where they worked. I still have it. I car-
ried it with me every time I moved. When my father gave me that,
it wasn’t an easy thing, because it meant he wasn’t going to make
wine the next year, and I knew why. My mother was not doing
well. That was 1987.”
Tullio’s parents both died in 1988, Virginia first, Achille soon
after. “He gardened up until the very end,” Tullio remembers.
“He loved that garden.”
f
In the summer of 1967, when Judith and Tullio were married,
twenty years after he’d left Italy with his father, Tullio took Ju-
dith to see Roccacaramanico.
“I didn’t realize it was going to be so traumatic to go back,”
he says. “My town was originally about eight hundred. When I
went back, there were fourteen people, mostly older women who
just didn’t want to leave. Only a couple of the houses were left
standing. My house was actually still there. And my aunt was
still living there when I went back.”
He remembers walking Judith through the town, up to the
stone church, then through the cemetery, where he found the
graves of his grandfather and grandmother. The graveyard was
untended, full of weeds and wildflowers, the stones broken and
falling over, the wall around it caving in. Tullio showed Judith
what was left of his house, with its fine stone arches and the
openings beside the front door where the baking ovens had been.
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And then he tried to find the barn, but there was nothing left but
a stone arch. “My barn was down, disappeared.”
Tullio’s eyes pool with tears, his voice breaks, and he cannot
speak. “I don’t want to remember,” he says. “It’s hard to say
why, you know. It was such a horrible experience. You remember
a place that was vital, alive with people, and then suddenly it
isn’t there anymore. The barn is where I used to play. It’s where
all the animals are. Ours was on the lower part of our house,
which was on a hill. We brought the animals in there in the win-
ter. You could just go down and take care of them, feed them.
The village was at a high elevation, so there used to be several
feet of snow. So it was hard to get around.”
Between nature and culture, the barn is one of the few struc-
tures we as a species have ever created that acknowledges how
dependent we are on other creatures. Maybe that’s why the barn
is so powerful, because finally it’s not simply for our own use.
“I thought maybe I remembered the place as beautiful because
I was a kid,” Tullio says. “But going back when I was older, I
was astounded by the beauty. La Maiella is a six-thousand-foot
mountain with beautiful formations. And then there are other
mountains around the village, and the fields, the vineyards and
orchards. It’s breathtaking. I’ve never seen anything as beauti-
ful. The land is so old. And then, knowing what silence is. Do
you know what silence is? No,” Tullio says gently, answering
for me. “They all did. And they knew what they were missing.
You know, they would talk about the stars being so intense, as
if there were more stars there than here, and why was that?
Of course there weren’t, but it seemed that way because we had
darkness there.”
No longer resisting the power of memory, Tullio slips from
they to we as he remembers the silence. When he returns to us- ing they, it allows him to honor his parents and to keep the hurt of his own loss at a distance.
“They knew they had left a very beautiful place, and they
were hurt by it. At the same time, they knew they had to leave.
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There was no way they could be there any longer. . . Most peo-
ple in America don’t understand what it means to endure such
a loss,” Tullio says after a moment, “because they’ve been so
protected.
“Being in the U.S. was devastating for most of my parents’
generation,” he continues. “My father was a shepherd in the
mountains and liked to be outside. He was uneducated, so he be-
came a factory worker. He worked for Hood Rubber, which later
became B. F. Goodrich. But making tires, working with rubber,
was smelly, horrible. And he had another job doing masonry. He
was a pretty good mason. He got out of his job in the evening
and he’d go do somebody’s porch steps or build a garage or a
chimney or something. He worked weekends. He liked that work
better. It was more gratifying, but it wasn’t as secure. He dragged
me along many times when I was a teenager. And that’s how I got
interested in building, actually, from him.
“What a life. He just worked all the time. They missed Italy.
They were here, accepting America in terms of opportunities, but
they also thought it was an intensely competitive place where
it was very difficult to do anything of quality. You know, every-
thing was quantity—working to make money to get a car. People
got into this rat race that everybody else was in and they lost
touch with nature and the beauty they had lived in.
“It’s staggering, what that first generation did, the pioneers.
I have great respect for them. All they gave up . . . they gave up
their whole history. They disengaged one from the other, fami-
lies, so my generation could be educated. What they did was very
important, it was very good for us. And then what it makes pos-
sible for the generations of my children and grandchildren now.
Had I stayed in our village in Italy, I would have been okay as a
shepherd, but I wouldn’t have known what I know now. I prize
what I’ve gained in terms of my knowledge. My mother could
just barely write, my father not at all. I used to educate my father,
when I was going to school. I’d hold up a basketball and say,
‘You know, the world looks like this, it’s actually turning around,
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and every twenty-four hours is a day and then a night.’ I would
try to explain it all. He was totally skeptical. They just barely
knew the world was round—barely. At the same time he really
appreciated that I was enjoying the learning. He was very re-
spectful. If anything, he would glorify my accomplishments to his
friends. ‘My son doesn’t have to work anymore because he’s an
architect now,’ he’d say.”
Tullio laughs. “I didn’t have to work, you know? My hands
were clean. He’d tell people how I made drawings and carried
them to the building site and watched while other people worked.
But they were ambivalent, because they knew they would lose me
to this culture, which they did. I pretty much disappeared from
their lives. In a way, that liberation is what made me what I am
today. Otherwise I would have been a mason or an auto me-
chanic, and I would have stayed in Watertown and been part of
that culture. But instead I went to the University of Oklahoma,
of all places, thousands of miles away. I went because some of
Frank Lloyd Wright’s disciples, people who worked with him,
were teaching there. After that I just kept going, without coming
home. I went to Arizona to work with Paolo Soleri. He was
about twenty-five years older than me but came to this country
from Italy the same year I did, right after the war.”
Soleri became a mentor and friend. At Arcosanti, Soleri’s city
in the desert, Tullio lived in Earth House, one of the dwellings
called an arcology, a fusion of the aesthetic principles of mod-
ernist architecture and the science of ecology. “It was hard to
leave,” Tullio says, but the most important encounter of his life
came soon after he came back east.
Hoping to earn a place at Louis Kahn’s architecture firm,
Tullio took a room in Philadelphia and volunteered in Kahn’s
office. As patient as he was persistent, he finally earned Kahn’s at-
tention. After studying the drawings Tullio had made during his
apprenticeship with Soleri, Kahn said little. Then he surprised
Tullio by asking him to look at his own new drawings. Even
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more astonishing, he asked Tullio what he thought of them. Af-
terward, Kahn took Tullio and Judith out for dinner. “You have
some good drawings there,” he said. There would be projects
coming up that might include a place for Tullio, but not for two
months.
Work with Kahn never materialized. Instead, Tullio began
to shape an architecture informed by gardens and by the human
scale of the handmade buildings of his native village. “Architec-
ture must become an environmental science rooted in the fun-
damental principles of nature,” he says. “Too many architects
preach sustainability and can’t grow vegetables or make a good
soup or compost their kitchen waste.” And they can’t build what
they design. “In all these years,” he says, “I have never stopped
being a decent carpenter. I think all architects should get away
from their drafting boards and computers and become master
builders again, as they were when the great cathedrals were
built.”
f
“What goes on inside of you when you’re making a garden, Tul-
lio?” I ask.
“I’m paying homage to my parents, very consciously, in the
garden,” he says without hesitation. “You know, our parents die,
but they’re always with us. They’re in our consciousness. They
come in a spooky way. I hear my father. Sometimes I sound just
like him. Some of him is inside me. So I do it for that, of course.
And it’s therapeutic and meditative. I’m too restless to meditate.
The closest I get is architecture. I will look at a drawing or a
model for a long time, deciding whether or not to remove a wall.
I’m not exactly without thought, but close. Gardening is like
that. It can be meditative.”
I think Tullio is going to talk about planting trees or grow-
ing tomatoes, harvesting his grapes, but no, it’s weeds that come
to mind.
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“You know how it is to weed. When you’re weeding, you’re
doing something for the benefit of the plant. It’s a service, so it’s
going to be good for you. That’s what I think.
“You know, for a long time I never realized it, but there are
people who don’t do gardening,” Tullio says. “So what is it that
makes us do it? Now there are fancy words for it. ‘Sustainability,’
being ‘ecological,’ recycling organic waste and having a compost
pile. But you know, they just did it. It’s important to know that.
It’s important to know how to cook, how to grow your own
food. It’s something I feel I have to do. I feel it’s my destiny to do
it. Maybe it comes from my roots, some instinct that I have. I’ve
never analyzed it, and I’ve never discussed it as I’m doing now.
I’ve just done it instinctively. It’s always just been there. It was
what you did.”
In so many ways, the new place in Leverett is Tullio’s homage
to what has always just been there—Roccacaramanico. The flat
roof celebrates height, the reward for climbing up being the con-
templation of what lies below, a shift in perspective that restores
a proper sense of scale, reminding us of our modest stature in a
world that was not designed simply for our use. The house, like a
mountain, lifts you up toward the night sky. And when you stand
on the roof in the silence of the night, with the dark woods all
around, the valley spread below, there is nothing to dim the light
of the stars.
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