Do I Bark Like a Dog? E-Book

Michael Volpe

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 285

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Growing up in the heart of London's immigrant Italian community, Michael Volpe always felt disconnected from the UK, the country of his birth. He felt different to his friends, had alternative cultural experiences, and never truly felt he belonged – an unease that has been exacerbated by Brexit for many immigrant families living in the UK. Exploring his colourful, rich and often dramatic life in London and summers spent in southern Italy among his large extended family, Do I Bark Like a Dog? considers the roots of Volpe's identity. Delving into family secrets and lies, he discovers how extraordinary events filtered through time to propel his unlikely but successful career in opera. Evocatively written and featuring circus stars, fascists and faked deaths, Do I Bark Like a Dog? is a deeply moving testimony to Volpe's mother and her family, and an extraordinary journey into the heart of a life that has left an indelible mark on the world of opera.

Leseprobe

praise for do i bark like a dog?

‘A fascinating account of identity and belonging. Volpe writes with passion, insight and humour about his Italian family and his life in London. I loved it.’

James HallAuthor of The Industry of Human Happiness

‘In gloriously exuberant language Volpe lays bare the essential him… This is a man who has opera in his blood and knows how to move us with a master-director’s artistry through a celebration of the value and delicacy of difference, which is often laugh-out-loud funny.’

Donald MacleodWriter and broadcaster

‘A jaw-dropping tale – poignant, powerful, passionate and political. Fasten your psychological seat belt for a wild ride.’

Kathy Lette

Author

‘As with Puccini or Mascagni, his tragicomic tales of life as an “English” boy from Campanian stock are a spezzatino of laughter, shock, tears and irresistible pleasure.’

Mark ValenciaOpera critic

‘At once tender and unflinching… this memoir is a song of self-discovery, celebrating the transformative power in remembering who we are. Michael Volpe demonstrates masterful storytelling with global resonance and local colour. This book will stay long in the memory.’

Nitin SawhneyComposer and producer, Booker Prize judge

‘A fine book. A love story really to identity. A treat.’

Daniel FinkelsteinJournalist and author of Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad

‘While Brexit continues tearing apart the nation, Michael has been watching and commenting on what’s been the needless tragedy of our times.’

Clare ColvinOpera critic and author

do i bark like a dog?

Do I Bark Like a Dog?

How an Italian Family History Shaped a Boy in London

michael volpe o.b.e.

renard press

Renard Press Ltd

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Do I Bark Like a Dog? first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2024

Text and Images © Michael Volpe, 2024

‘Learning to Look Up’ and ‘Flaming June…’ © Leanora Volpe, 2024

Michael Volpe asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Renard Press is proud to be a climate positive publisher, removing more carbon from the air than we emit and planting a small forest. For more information see renardpress.com/eco.

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contents

Do I Bark Like a Dog?

Prologo

Changing Times

Awakenings

The Devil Is in the Detail

Gioia!

A Full-Sized Italian and How I Got There

Brexit

Montecorvino

Causing a Scene

La Famiglia Perillo

The Discoveries in Florence

And So…?

Acknowledgments

Family Tree

About the Author

do i bark like a dog?

prologo

I was born in Kensington in 1965. I grew up in Shepherd’s Bush, on the streets and railway tracks of west London, the housing estates of Fulham, the terraces at Chelsea FC’s Stamford Bridge, and at a remarkable English school at the bucolic end of Suffolk. I work in the world of opera, and Princess Anne pinned an OBE on my lapel at Windsor Castle, and yet, to this day, I feel one hundred per cent Italian.

How I perceive myself has always been framed by my immigrant family and childhood experiences, by the culture and language around me, the places where I spend time and the dramas and angst that seem so uniquely Mediterranean. This interpretation of myself seemed never to be just incidental or a mere oddity; it was more than that, and it is something I believe set me apart – I think it still does – although not in any particularly superior way.

That’s a lie, actually. I did, at some point, believe it made me superior. When I was a child, the sense of otherness came through my knowledge of things beyond the experience of my friends, if only of culture, language, landscapes and food. These were profound topics to impose upon my playmates, and impose them I most certainly did. Ever since, people have asked me what I mean when I declare my cultural allegiance, but to be perfectly honest I don’t have a ready or easy explanation.

As I grew through my teens and into adulthood, my Italianness sometimes met with hostility, racism or lazy stereotyping; yet despite such incidents, my experience and demonstrable attachment to my cultural origins more often met with a positive glow. The boom in international travel meant that more people became Italophiles, and more and more would talk animatedly to me about their love of the place.

I identify with Italy and, although I have never made it my home, at home is what I feel whenever I visit the country, despite its myriad problems – a list of which would also fill a book.

The determination of others to criticise and upbraid me for feeling this way appears to be endless. ‘You were born in England, so you are English,’ they say.

Ironically, the fact that a person was born in the UK now appears to mean very little to some – and they don’t actually think being born here means much if your skin isn’t lily-white.

Instinctively, I find absurd the idea that my place of birth – the legal definition of my nationality – and the passport I hold define me more distinctly than the culture that nurtured me. Here I often meet with objections, because people believe the UK did nurture and educate me, and it was the UK that supported my immigrant family. None of this is untrue, but it doesn’t change the way I feel about who I am. As it so happens, because my parents registered my birth in Italy, I am an Italian citizen, can vote in elections there and was even called up for military service, so I am legally an Italian, too. But, if I might paraphrase the quote attributed erroneously to the Duke of Wellington: ‘If a man is born in a stable, does that make him a horse?’

Well, does it?

I first heard the quote when one of my uncles, who lives in the UK but is an inveterate Italian patriot, used it to insist that my brothers and I ought to consider ourselves, first and foremost, Italians. Actually, what he used to say was: ‘If a horse is born in a stable, does it bark like a dog?’ I have no idea where the dog came into it, but I knew what he meant. The original quote I have since seen appropriated by racists on the far right, so the question, particularly post-Brexit referendum, has begun to take on a more sinister undertone. But this was also a genetic argument – almost one about racial purity – that I am instinctively uncomfortable with. I don’t feel as though I want to make an argument in favour of this dimension of the discussion, but cannot promise I won’t go perilously close to it at times.

To be perfectly honest, I have always felt a little like a fish out of water in Britain, and I know many who feel the same. You cannot experience a life that has a dimension of rich, foreign family history (experiences, a different language, a name that singles you out) and not find yourself scrabbling for a sense of where you belong. It claws at you, digs you in the ribs and, in my case, makes me look at the British with the eye of an outsider.

And then came Brexit. What had been a lifelong philosophical imbalance for me became a bona fide reality as half of the UK decided any association with the country of my family was to be eschewed. Brexiters may tell you they feel animosity towards the institution of the EU, not towards Europeans, but it doesn’t actually feel like that.

Nostalgia for my social and genetic history, those Italian family visits that were like character-plays, is packaged into parcels of memory: a home life and several holidays distinguished by our growth from small children into teenagers, and then into adults. It is a measure of either its potency or my emotional penury that my identity is based on what amounts to a few months’ worth of experience in Italy as a child and as a young man. I would contend, however, that I had a reference point and persistent experiences that none of my friends in London had.

I can imagine there are countless people, from all races and religions, who feel the way I do about their cultural histories. Our everyday lives are here in the UK, where we experience everything the country has to offer, or is supposed to stand for. We go through the big events with those who consider themselves to be exclusively British – or English – but we don’t always feel a part of it. When the Queen died, I looked at the whole extraordinary process without a patriotic eye, but I fully understood what she meant to the country. I saw a national performance I could admire, but not feel. This wasn’t an anti-royalist position; the Queen had figured large in my life, just as she had in everybody else’s. My mother was fascinated by the royals, and I was never taught to hate them, yet I don’t have a pride in them as English people do. The Queen’s death created a strange feeling in the country, similar to its reaction to the death of Princess Diana. Indeed, although that event had an inherently shocking impact on most people, including me, it was the strangeness of its aftermath that most struck me. Working close to Kensington Palace at the time, I wandered along to the gardens, completely bewildered by the scale of the automaton mourning, thousands of people quietly emerging from the tube and walking silently, flowers in hand, towards the palace. I felt like an observer, griefless, outside of the loop, watching this display and seeing the ocean of blooms running all the way from the palace to Kensington High Street.

In the context of Diana’s death, it all struck me as a peculiarly British display of guilt, but I was aware of how the soap opera of the royal family has always provided a strong sense of identity for the nation. Wandering the edge of the flower-line with a couple of colleagues, we all gently laughed at a comment one of us had made, and were instantly set upon by a furious passer-by who believed we were being disrespectful. It wasn’t the moment to go toe-to-toe with the mourner over what a lot of people saw as the hypocrisy of the grief, but, if I am honest, I didn’t feel it was my place to point it out anyway.

There are countless examples of this disconnect, of a lack of ‘affinity’, but while I admire much about the UK, the things for which British people feel pride I do not share in, because pride is a possessive concept. I’ll avoid the philosophical oddity of feeling proud of things your accident of birth had no role in creating – like beautiful countryside – but I sense the UK is itself setting fire to many of the societal qualities that once distinguished the country. At the new King’s coronation, republican protestors were arrested before they’d even done any protesting, which ignited a blaze of objection on social media from people concerned at the authoritarian behaviour of the police. Others felt that to protest at such a moment (is there a better moment for an anti-monarchist to protest?) was robbing the public of their enjoyment of the day. Nevertheless, many of us, including royalists, were gravely concerned at the curtailing of an inalienable right Britain had done so much to defend over the years, and at which other countries gazed longingly. It appears that England, in particular, is having a crisis of identity which in turn is fanning the flames of mine.

I have always just accepted a lifetime of discombobulation as an inevitable consequence of my Italian origins. Until now, it hadn’t become the meaning of life, nor had it ever truly punctured my sense of security; not feeling ‘at home’ in the UK wasn’t critical. It was just there, and I didn’t spend my time being angry about it.

I’m in my fifties, and yet my family origins still resonate with me; in fact, the history becomes more important with age. Curiously, as I write, the splendid American actor Stanley Tucci is all over the media with his recollections of his Italian family, projecting his memories through the prism of food. It all seems so lovely, but there is little that is benign about my lot or the life stories that emerge. There will be no food recipes in this volume (although food will pop up from time to time).

I am spilling my beans as I go along, so whatever gets there first gets on the page. I realise I have had a strange and dramatic life when all is said and done, but understanding its origins and its importance to my character and mentality is what made me sit down to write this book. When I told my brother Sergio about this project, he said, ‘It sounds like therapy.’ He could be right. I’ll be perfectly frank and say there are things I don’t think will make it to the page; there are people who would not want me to tell their entire stories because of the pain it would cause.

People have, though, asked me what this book is about, and I suppose that may well be something best decided by the reader. It is memoir of a fashion, a family history and a journey of self-exploration, tying together the experiences of people decades ago and discovering their impact on the life of a boy in London. Any point that may emerge by the final page will presumably percolate to the surface, just like the coffee in the little silver stove-top pot my mother used, but the story I tell might prove more interesting and important than any part I play in it. The tales I tell, and their implications, cascade down through the generations, landing at my feet. Throughout my life I have chosen to pick up the pieces and fit them into my own puzzle.

One final thing: this is how I remember it. If you have evidence to the contrary, keep it to yourself.

changing times

It is a simple truth that my affiliation with people and places twelve hundred miles from London runs deep. It is important to remember that the vast majority of my (large) close extended family live in Italy, and they have their own memories and a sense of ownership of the exotic, too. But a 2016 trip to Montecorvino, my parents’ home town, close to Salerno, proved to be as profoundly revealing as any I had experienced before, and what characterised it was the normality of the dysfunction I encountered, the fracturing of families I remembered as being loudly and dynamically united and the unveiling of a side to Italy that, despite its occasional ugliness, has done little to diminish my desire to identify with the place, warts and all.

It was also my first visit to the family seat without my mother, whose death two years prior, along with that of my brother Matteo, framed the visit in ways I should have expected, but which still set trip wires for me to stumble over. I had not kept in touch with much of my family in the years since my last visit in 2004, but Facebook had brought me back into contact with cousins I had once been close to and, indeed, with their children.

Mum’s absence was difficult to bear because these were the places I so explicitly associated with her and her history. I had to dredge the Italian language from the depths of my memory (or perhaps my soul?) but, more specifically, I was calling forth the dialect my family speaks at great velocity, and there was no Mum to fill in the gaps or to translate the more colourful, acrobatic passages. I was soon engaging in arguments with a fluency I would prefer to be more refined but was nevertheless grateful for. Neapolitan dialect doesn’t bother much with verbs, which means you can be as inaccurate as you like and nobody notices.

Arriving at Naples airport and driving to Montecorvino always makes me feel a little anxious. The traits of southern Italians that can send a person insane include the way they drive, but in general terms Naples is the capital city of a place called Dontgiveafuckville. And Neapolitans remain the most creatively manipulative population on the planet.

I could give you several stories, told to me by Mum, of spectacularly brazen cons played by Neapolitans. My favourite is probably the chaps selling expensive televisions from the back of a lorry, raking in the cash quickly and handing people their heavy sealed boxes, which, when excitedly opened at home, contained the empty shell of a large TV full of nothing but newspapers.

The car hire at the airport is a good example of simple Neapolitan trading logic. The hire centre is five hundred yards from the airport terminal building, and you could walk there, dragging your bags in the pitiless heat along precarious and pedestrian-unfriendly roads, or you could take the shuttle bus from the car park opposite, which is still a dangerous feat to reach. If you choose the bus option, you discover that the shuttle is a small minibus driven by a man who loathes his job – and probably you, too – and you are fortieth in the queue. However, there are helpful taxi drivers nearby, who are prepared to take you the five hundred yards for a crisp ten-euro note, and your first thought should be that the car-hire companies’ staff are getting a kickback from the cabbies – because that is the way it works in Naples. The logic is that nothing in life is, or should be, entirely free unless you are prepared to suffer (as here, wait an hour to go five hundred yards), so you make life a little easier by paying. They have this philosophy down to a fine art, and you can’t help but admire them, despite your initial irritation. There is nobody to complain to, either, and if there were, they would have the ready answer that you could just as easily have waited for the helpful and generously free shuttle service. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

In Naples, you are never the cat who gets the cream, but they can make you feel as though you are as you gleefully hand over the ten euros, thinking you have beaten the system.

My first port of call was Lucio, the second-born son of Isidoro, my mother’s elder brother, but it became quickly apparent that any hopes of a large family reunion would be dashed on the rocks of siblingly enmity. Lucio, a baker for as long as I can remember, is still working from his factory in Macchia, and his small but vibrant business, Iperpan, has made a name for itself, and is well known throughout the region. He specialises in the dried, aniseed-tinged pane biscottato that are soaked in water before being broken into rough lumps to be mixed through a tomato salad or to mop up sauce. His bakery has above it a large house that is divided into apartments for him and his children Ivo and Anna Maria, both of whom work at the hot ovens alongside him. Lucio, though, had ended his relationships with his siblings; I have never found out what exactly precipitated this state of affairs, and I’m sure if I did there would be several versions.

It was at his insistence that I had visited Lucio on the first day of my trip.

‘What time do you arrive?’ he said on the telephone.

‘Midday,’ I answered.

‘OK, my house, two o’clock,’ he demanded.

He remains as emotional and warm-hearted as I remember him to be, but a note of cynicism has emerged – or perhaps it’s sadness? He works hard, from 4 a.m. each day, and his hands and thumbs are painful from working tonnes of dough over decades. Machines do much of that work now, but he reminds me of his father Isidoro as he sits at the table on his balcony, occasionally drifting off into private thought.

‘You must come and see us every day and have lunch,’ he said, not really considering that holidays these days had other pleasures in which to indulge oneself. But I had lunch with him for three days, and, despite the chasms between my previously close family members, I still had other cousins with whom a meal was insisted upon. Eventually, across the period of a week, I spent time with five of the fourteen children born to my mother’s siblings – but the realisation that I possibly won’t ever see those estranged cousins again was exquisitely sad.

The romanticised view I had of this corner of Italy has now changed. The beautiful landscape still strikes hard, even though modernity has arrived, along with growing towns and a knowing tourist industry. Yet what had always been pastoral, quaint poverty now just feels like the rapacious grasp of twenty-first-century inequality – and southern Italians drift between complete apathy and seething resentment according to the day of the week.

None of my family are living in centuries-old houses in imposing, high-sided cobbled streets any more, but in architecturallyfunctional apartments. Visiting my cousin Nunzia on the edge of Battipaglia had a certain feel of danger to it, and although the gated estate in which they live might at first appear to be an accoutrement of affluence, it felt as though the electronic fences and doors were necessary to bar the way of a beast.

Public housing or not, the staggering vista from their balcony offers a full panoramic image of the mountains behind the town, craggy peaks from horizon to horizon, jutting up from the plain, with the sun waiting to plunge behind them. On their slopes you can follow the chain of villages from Montecorvino Pugliano, where my mother was born, down through MontecorvinoRovella, my father’s birthplace, and then upwards again to Acerno. The roaring concrete serpent of the E45 autostrada that thunders past just a few hundred metres in front of us is the dividing line between the gloriously comforting past and the threatening present. Walking through the kitchen door on to that balcony and seeing that vision was as affecting as anything I was to experience on my trip. To Nunzia and her family, this was a daily sight, but for me it was like seeing a tapestry of my youthful memory, a landscape painting of my history; and from that distance, nothing had changed.

Standing beside me on the balcony, Marco, Nunzia’s husband, was perplexed by my apparent speechlessness. ‘Wow,’ I repeated. ‘Just wow.’ He wouldn’t have known that I was tracing the road between the villages and remembering how I used to ride the route on a scooter, nor what it meant to me to arrive at the top and look back on to the very position where we were standing, miles away. He probably didn’t know the stories I knew of my mother’s youth, or of wartime, the things that happened in those villages, even though a mile away was a British war cemetery filled with men who landed at Salerno. He would not have known how that view represented whole lives lived and now lost, families once united but now divided. He wouldn’t have understood why I couldn’t speak or swallow or stop the tears.

My cousins were keen to wallow in nostalgia, too. Lidia, Nunzia’s younger sister, named after my mother – both of them, along with their youngest sister Ines and brother Ferruccio, are the children of Rolando, my uncle and one-time circus performer – loved to reminisce about our time as kids and our summer visits.

‘I used to wait excitedly for you all to come in the summers, she said. ‘I always remember how Zia Lidia would arrive with a suitcase filled with clothes for all of us. It was like having another Christmas.’

Before making her annual trip, Mum used to spend days in North End Road market buying cheap T-shirts, sweaters and dresses for her relatives. An entire suitcase was filled with them, many of them weirdly inappropriate (vests with peculiar graphics were Rolando’s favourite), but she was, in her mind, looking after her family, who she knew had little money for new clothes. All of my cousins on this trip were enormously emotional about the loss of Mum and wanted to talk about her. And they also wanted to talk about Matt, my late and frequently miscreant brother, whom they all appeared to have adored. Matt had gone to live in Montecorvino at about the age of seventeen – a desperate attempt by Mum to get him away from bad influences in London. The fact that Matt quickly attracted the local delinquents did nothing to diminish the affectionate memories of him my cousins wanted to share, somewhat painfully, with me.

‘He was beautiful, your brother. Everybody loved him,’ they would say tearfully, but when they saw how it affected me, they would rush apologetically to close down the conversation, as though guilty for having evoked the memory. It happened again and again throughout the visit, and it was exhausting. I was struck by the affection for Matt because it would have been some thirty years since he had last been to Italy, and so my family were, like me, holding on to romantic memories of distant, exotic relatives. They never got to see where his life took him, the physical peaks and troughs and the eventual irreversible decline of his drug addiction, nor his prison time, his utter chaos. I don’t think that is a bad thing – I try not to remember that version of him.

It was Zio Rolando and his family with whom we spent most of our time as kids in Italy. their ancient little house in the backstreets of Nuvola, on the edge of Montecorvino, had pig sties beneath it and thick stone walls. Like London, and my first slum home there, these old relics have been demolished or converted into fancy homes, their original poverty-stricken residents moved on to charmless, crumbling modernity. Rolando’s children were fiery, and Rolando didn’t spend a lot of his time trying to manage them. I spoke a great deal in my book Noisy at the Wrong Times about Rolando, the circus performer and mushroom collector, the brother Mum most adored. It was Rolando who seemed to epitomise my own Italianness when I expressed it to my friends as a youngster, because despite his almost peasant-like demeanour, he had about him a veneer of Big Top glamour and superhuman strength. He was impossibly handsome, too, fantastically unique and funny, with a brilliantly expressive way of telling stories. His warm heart was the icing on this rich cake; I spent much of this trip hearing stories of him from his children, some of them much darker than I had imagined.

Italian families – in the south, at least – revel in history and past events, enjoying the conspiratorial elements more than any, embellishing and speculating to a point where you simply don’t know whose version of a story to believe. My cousin Nunzia – whose physical similarities to Mum are striking – occupies the throne in this regard, sitting in the middle of a group gossiping and reeling off tales of misdemeanour, most of which appear to be laced with a little invention and which bring frequent admonishment from her son, Vittorio:

‘Mamma! You can’t say that. That isn’t what happened!’

Nunzia would plough on regardless.

I had heard from my own mother the story of Rolando’s short spell in prison back in the 1950s. He had been on a public bus that had pulled into the main square in Montecorvino, and the bus driver, for one reason or another, had offended a woman passenger. Rolando had taken issue. The driver then insulted Rolando and promptly shut the door, thinking himself safe, so Rolando took a seat at a café, supposing the driver would have to get off at some point since it was the end of the line. Noticing Rolando waiting, the driver stayed put, so eventually Rolando put his fist through the glass of the door and gave him a good hiding.

However, in Nunzia’s version, the story came to include the use of a knife, which Rolando had allegedly plunged into the driver’s thigh (it wouldn’t kill him there). It occurs to me that Mum may have spared me the nastiest aspect of the altercation and that Nunzia was telling the truth, but it is impossible to know. The fact that Rolando had punched out the side of a bus was something of a legend in the town by all accounts, and I remember thinking it hugely impressive when Mum first told me about it. Whether he went to jail for the beating or a stabbing I am still unsure.

One evening, Rolando’s children, together around the dinner table, revealed one lie (or a trimmed truth) my mother had told me about my uncle. His glamorous life as a circus performer had begun, we had always been told, as a teenager when he was ‘discovered’ larking about near the circus tent with his friends. The owner had spotted his acrobatic prowess and had asked my grandparents if he could take Rolando and train him. Mum told us that her parents had refused, but Rolando ran away with them anyway.

What was certainly true was that Rolando had become a minor celebrity and a real star of the trapeze, but the story had allegedly begun in his tenth year, when my grandparents, dirt poor and desperate, had agreed for him to join the Circo Fratelli Zavatta for a regular stipend. My mind cannot bear to contemplate what happened to him as a child; his heavy drinking and frequent desire for solitude in later life may have been telling a story of its own. My mother’s need to prolong the lie and the bitterness she preserved in the memory of her parents suggests she never forgave them for it. She adored Rolando.

It was because of these stories and memories that I was especially keen to see Ferruccio, Rolando’s only son and my cousin, whom I had last seen over thirty-five years ago. In that period, Ferruccio had spent eight years in jail for activities whose nature nobody wanted to share in detail. I didn’t know what to expect. He had always been a mischievous, loud character, but how had he matured?

‘Mike, when you see him,’ Lidia said, ‘you will think he is my father.’

He had now moved up the mountain and was living in Giffoni with his new wife and an eleven-month-old child, Ines, named after his sister. As a carpenter, he works fitfully when work is available on building sites, he is settled and is doing right by his family. I wasn’t prepared, however, for the shock (and yes, emotional impact) of seeing him again. He was, as Lidia had reported, the image of his father at the same age; not as muscular, but he carried himself in the same way, his face was exactly the same, as were his mannerisms, voice and expression – even the way he sat with the back of his hand crooked to rest on his hip. And he smoked thin cigars just as his father had. I sat watching him, speechless at first, as though he were a reincarnation. Almost immediately, he asked me for photographs of my mother and brother Matt.

Of all my cousins, Ferruccio was the one I had seen least of over the years, so to see him for the first time since we were sixteen was powerful, but I wondered – perhaps I was even angry with myself – why our two lives had remained so parallel to each other. Why, if I was so emotionally connected to my Italian background, had I allowed it to remain an infrequent part of my adult life?

Marriage, careers and children intervene, for sure, but my eldest children, now into their twenties and thirties, have been to Montecorvino on only one occasion together. That was in 2004, when, before a full-length holiday in Sorrento, we visited Montecorvino. Knowing three days wouldn’t be enough to visit all of my relatives, and that offence can be easily caused, we decided to host a large lunch for all of them at a restaurant. It was the first time I had ever seen members of my father’s family in the same room as those of my mother. What was striking is that the Volpe clan was represented only by my then ninety-four-year-old grandmother, my aunt Anna-Maria – the only one of my father’s siblings who hadn’t left for England – and my cousin Tina, daughter of my Uncle Matteo, born and raised in England, who had married and gone back to live in Montecorvino. The Perillos had about fifty attendees. That event was also an emotional occasion, mainly because of the presence of my paternal grandmother who, with dementia enveloping her mind, didn’t realise I was her grandson but exclaimed, on seeing me, that I looked like her son, Francesco. I remember that I promised myself I would visit more, keep in touch, but I didn’t, and my children never asked to go again.

Now, twelve years later, sitting opposite Ferruccio, I began to wonder if a consistent relationship between me and my family might have changed aspects of my life. Or theirs. These meetings were becoming so pungently nostalgic that it began to confuse me, and I remembered how as a youngster I used to really love my cousins, and how they in turn loved us. I invited Lucio, Nunzia, Lidia, Ferruccio and their families to lunch at the farmhouse hotel at which we were staying. It was, in fact, the first time the cousins had been together for years, and we had a good meal, wine and grappa on the terrace – a family occasion they rarely enjoy these days, it seems. We reminisced, and Ferruccio and I implored Lucio to repair his relationships