My career as a writer—and life writ large—took a dramatic turn when I received a contract to write My Two Italies in 2011, my first book for general readers and a swerve from the more academic work I had done till then. I was initially planning to a write a cultural history of Italy, culminating in the turbulent Berlusconi era. Neither I nor my editor was sure exactly what form the book would take: the contract even listed the work as untitled. I had reams of material on Italy that I had gathered as a student, scholar, and teacher. But I was missing the engine that could move along this bulk of information. So I struggled. Weeks, months passed, and still I had no book, no narrative center. Then one day I went to the Bard library, punching the metaphysical clock once again for work on this unborn book, and as so often happens to me when I am in a comfortable space surrounded by books…I fell asleep. And dreamed.
I found myself back in my childhood home, bursting into the house after a day at school, hoping for a buttered slab of my mother’s freshly baked bread or warm, crispy wine biscuits. Instead, a smell from the downstairs oven stopped me dead in my tracks, filling me with nausea. She was making tripe. In two large black cauldrons, my mom was boiling cow stomach. Somehow, the awful scent was a wakeup call, reminding that I shouldn’t try and “write” this book; I should just remember it, let the stories of my childhood tell themselves and spill onto the page. You could say that I smelled the sources for the book as much as remembered them. The taste of a tiny madeleine cake in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time famously unleashes a flood of memories in the narrator. For me, the Prime Mover had been the lowly tripe. To this day, I can’t pass by a Tuscan tripe stand without holding my nose and expressing my literary gratitude.
In the suspended space of her stories, my mom ceased being the one thing that had defined her life since age seventeen and her first child: a mother.
My book now had a center of gravity: I would reproduce the smells, sounds, and stories of my childhood, a point of intersection between Italy’s ancient culture, the aspirations of the American Dream, and the struggles of a large family caught between Calabrian lore and the secular freedoms of a me-first consumer culture. All I had to do was close my eyes, like that fateful day in Bard’s Stevenson Library, and remember. But, of course, as all authors know, you can’t write a book alone. Whether it’s a dedicated editor who inhabits your prose as intensely as you do, or a loving partner who keeps the children from shouting outside your office door, you need a scaled-down version of the proverbial village to get your work done. I had all the material I needed and then some, and after that epiphany in the library I now had a plan. All I needed was a muse.
This source of inspiration would come not from some elusive ideal of youthful beauty like Dante’s Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura, but rather in the nurturing form of my eighty-something mom, Yolanda Luzzi, who had swathed herself in mournful black for years after the death of my father in 1995. Now that I could smell the past, I needed to hear its voice. My mother supplied that, not only reporting past events but also acting them out, giving life to what would have otherwise remained abstract fragments of memory. Her performances took place either in the morning, as we drank coffee together, or in the evening, when we would convene for dinner in her yellow kitchen or, in summertime, in the backyard at the picnic table. This was the setting I loved best. It was filled with ghosts. I could feel my late father lurking by the cement steps where he had signed his named decades earlier, as if to record with sober fatality his arrival in the United States and the definitive loss of his native land: P. L. Nato Acri 1923, Pasquale Luzzi Born in Acri, Calabria, 1923. The tree that hovered above our picnic table had been the site of my childhood forts and my mother’s tireless industry, where she hung clothes and dried rugs on its branches.
Our summer dinners consisted of wedges of heirloom tomatoes from her garden, sprinkled with salt and coated in oil, then paired with slices of her homemade bread. There was of course an obligatory pasta dish, on lucky nights hand-rolled fusilli that she somehow cranked out with a thin iron rod. My mom generally did not drink wine: bygone Calabrian gender protocols held that men could and should imbibe it in industrial quantities, but ladies should demur, except for the occasional goccia, drop, on holidays and saints’ days. Yet, as she narrated stories from her homeland, Yolanda would agree to have a glass of the Calabrian red that we continued to make in my father’s honor.
Yolanda Luzzi understood the first cardinal rule of a great story: it has to be interesting to you first, if it’s going to hold the attention of your listeners and readers.
In the suspended space of her stories, my mom ceased being the one thing that had defined her life since age seventeen and her first child: a mother. As she narrated the tale of how my father forced her into marrying him by trapping her inside her house when she was fourteen, making their village think that he had his way with her and thus stolen her honor, she became the frightened young girl whose childhood was taken her from her in the space of an afternoon. When she told me what it felt like to arrive in America alone in her twenties, without her husband and four children, tasked with establishing her family in a strange new land, she was once again the confused but determined immigrant ready to break with all that she had known till then. And when she spoke of losing her domineering husband after fifty years of difficult, devoted love, her eyes flashed with a mix of anger and sadness, the wish that their life together had been more gentle and the regret of being divided from the person who had shared her soul.
Soon after my book was published, I returned to my mom’s kitchen and, with a cup of coffee between us, filmed our conversation. When I asked her why she had come to America, she replied, “Siamo venuti ca per campare più buono perchè c’era la fatiga,” “We came here to live better because there was work here.” The word she chose for work, which in standard Italian is lavoro, was fatigare, “to tire oneself, become fatigued,” the perfect signifier for men like my father, for whom America entailed endless manual toil and passing out from exhaustion at the dinner table in a haze of cigarette smoke. When I asked her what she missed about Italy, my mom surprised me, answering in broken English: “To tell you the truth, I no miss it…my husband miss, not me.” “I missed my mother, my father,” she went on, always in English. But by the time of the interview, everyone from her childhood family had died, so she added with typical matter-of-factness, “I got no brothers, no sisters, what am I going to miss?”
What strikes me now, in watching the video, was how bored and uncomfortable, even annoyed, my mom looks in it. And how different these no-nonsense responses were from the poetry that issued from her mouth when we would sit out by the picnic table and she would reanimate her past. I understand why. In this interview, my mom is not sharing stories. Rather, she’s responding to questions and cues in what must have felt like an interrogation to her. Under the family oak tree, the storyteller in her was allowed to speak more naturally and, even better, rewrite her own life story. My mom was not one to put things down on paper—that was my terrain and she was more than happy to assist me. But make no mistake, those summertime stories about love and loss in Calabria, about the first uncertain steps of a family in the New World, were as much for her as for me. Yolanda Luzzi understood the first cardinal rule of a great story: it has to be interesting to you first, if it’s going to hold the attention of your listeners and readers. And so she held forth, the words pouring out of her in what would be her lone work and her masterpiece, the Book of Life.
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The Innocents of Florence: The Renaissance Discovery of Childhood by Joseph Luzzi is available from W.W. Norton & Company.