The Italian South

Above, my grandparents’ hometown of Scerni, in the province of Chieti, in the Abruzzo region of Italy.

The irony did not escape me. There I was, at a holiday weekend picnic/barbecue in a relatively affluent town in New Jersey, surrounded by friendly and  interesting and educated people — in a setting and surroundings where my Italian immigrant grandmother would have felt like she’d landed on another planet…if she even knew or believed in the existence of other planets,  seeing as she believed the moon landing and moon walks were faked.

(She also believed in the evil eye. And once, when we made a family trip to upstate New York and visited a place called Howe Caverns, we actually convinced Grandma DiGiovanni to take an elevator down into the caverns. We even got her to get into the flat-bottomed boat which took visitors on a ride on the cavern’s underground river…