Collisions

I can’t remember how old I was the last time I traveled to Italy, but I do remember: being desperately bored, listening to my Sony Walkman, scribbling in my journal, eyeing the cute Italian boys. Wishing I could talk to them, but more, wishing I was home. I guess I must have been 16. It was my fourth trip to my dad’s home town and the last time I would see my grandmother and all my cousins, second cousins, honourary uncles and aunts.

My dad’s home town is an Italian village called Ripabottoni. It is home to fewer than 700 people and probably as many cats. Last night I found myself walking its streets using the “street view” function of google maps and I scrolled and strolled through the town, delighting when each turn revealed something I remembered. It was as if I had just been there. (yes, it is a very old town, and despite an earthquake a few years ago, it looks mostly the same as it has since the beginning.) There was the pharmacy, there was the tobacconist, there was the bar that had the jukebox that played that song I was obsessed with. I took a turn on a random road and sure enough it was the road that led up the steep hill to the cemetery. I wandered up the main street out of town where every night, starting at dusk, the young people in town would form a kind of procession, walking slowly to the edge of town and back again. They would smoke cigarettes and gossip and laugh. Sometimes they got ice cream. Sometimes they got cold drinks. This nightly walking back and forth, I remember thinking it was strange, stupid, pointless. Like small, caged rodents, they just went to their boundary and then back again. I went with my cousins, my mom, trailing behind, not getting the jokes and stories told in the local dialect.

I came to be looking at my dad’s town on the Internet because yesterday I encountered a writer, Eufemia Fantetti, who is an Italian-Canadian and whose family is from a town very close to my dad’s town. I was reading a piece of hers – last year’s winning entry in Event Magazine’s creative non-fiction contest – this brilliant piece of writing that opened with mention of her family’s regional dialect, their way of saying, “let’s go” and the words were familiar, it was my regional dialect too. I came home to search for her little town and discovered it is only a few miles from my little town and I felt proud by association and then sad because it is not my little town at all, it is only a place I’ve been. A place I claim affiliation with because it is more interesting than here, now that I am here.

Which is, probably, part of the reason my dad left; to go somewhere more interesting than “here.” He is one of the ones who walked to the end of the road and kept going.

Here I am, a born and bred Metro Vancouverite, rooted and blooming and wishing I could go back to see that place. I thought I remembered it so hazily. That I can navigate its streets 20 years later makes me feel closer to it, as though it is not as forgotten as I had thought, not merely a place where I spent some time as a child. It feels like there is something there for me; secrets under its cobbled streets, tucked between the stone walls. My history, or maybe just another version of home.

I used to think I needed my father as a guide, to go back with me and my family and show us things, interpret for us. He does not want to go, though. There are things he does not want to see and feel again. I might have to go alone. Or with my own kids, boring them with my own memories while they sit, headphones on, wondering why this history, this home, is so important to me.