The Boot

The first I ever knew about Italy I learned at a restaurant in Upstate New York. The Hillside was my family’s weekly haunt for three generations (and was to become Traficanti’s Hillside – but that was much later). It was on old Route 209, and when I was a young child it was run by a family of Italians of the ‘old school’ – beehive hairdos and such – but it had little to do with Italy as we know it. It was one of those old-style places that advertised “Continental Cuisine – Steaks and Chops” on a white-and-neon sign out front with flickering colored lights around another sign by the road that advertised “Cocktails”.

Inside, the décor was all irregular stone and rustic – deer heads and strange-shaped bottles of something. Once when I was about two, they took me to visit the kitchen and I was sure I saw a dad man (maybe Jesus?) hanging bleeding inside the door of the meat cooler. I ran screaming to my mommy at the vision, but in retrospect, I think it was probably just a side of beef.

One of the more Italian aspects of the Hillside was the clams and mussels over a huge plate of spaghetti, which from the age of two I dove into happily on a regular basis (you should have seen the mess!). The other Italian thing was the placemats, or rather what was printed on the paper mats, which always became marred with grease as the meal when on – a big red boot kicking a little stone that had little red flags sticking out at different points to demarcate cities. My father leaned over proudly and pointed to one some ways down toward the heel. “Naples – that’s where our people come from. That’s where Nana was born”.

Nobody in the family had ever been there, except Nana of course, but she left when she was two on a big ship and didn’t remember a thing. “No, it wasn’t really Naples”, chimed in an aunt from across the table. “I think it was a little town outside called Vicin’ di Napoli”.

I looked at this big, strangely shaped and greasy but fashionable boot a good long time, trying to imagine what it must have been like for Nana and her family to live inside it – why had our people left – how bad could it have been? Was the spaghetti and clams there better there than in Upstate New York?

My first real whiff of that exotic world came shortly thereafter when my parents let me accompany them on a pilgrimage to the veritable temple of everything Italian in north of Yonkers: Toscani and Sons. The sign over the door said ‘Latticini’, which already evoked flavors of the Old World, which had invoked such beautiful suffering on my ancestors. Toscani’s was recognizable from way down Main Street among the college-town pubs and book shops with its strange Italian writing and stately, almost awe-inspiring presence. Once inside, you were hit immediately by a new and pleasurable smell that carried you away to another place, another time – impossible to describe, but it used to hypnotize me. To this day, I can’t quite tell what it was, except a combination of exotic cheeses, meats, biscotti and assorted products from the motherland that were otherwise unknown to the Upstate New York palate. Through the clear glass of built-in bins along the back wall, I would stand staring at the dried beans – lupini and chickpeas and little round white ones and a yellow sand that I later learned was polenta. I would inhale deeply and ponder each bin with its strange contents, imagining what it would taste like.

Then I would turn and join my mother or father by the giant counter, filled with braided cheese, fresh-made sausage, hams, delicacies under oil, and really begin to wonder what horrible events had induced our people to leave world of all this behind. In the end, our family would emerge with an assortment of rich provolone, marinated artichokes, soprassata, and the crown jewel – prosciutto di Parma. All the other goods were a tease – this was what we had all really wanted. It was like gold – so expensive, pink and delicate; it was to be eaten with care and humility, wrapped gingerly around a breadstick and savored – it cost over 20 dollars a pound! And it brought back all the sights and smells of that shop, and of that beloved but terrible Old Country we had never known – where wide women stirred pots of strange, steaming beans and kids snacked on prosciutto every day after school but had no shoes.

Now here I am all grown up, snacking on prosciutto di Parma in my tiny Roman apartment – no work to be found in Naples or would have gone there. My husband knows that I’m feeling low and is therefore cleaning. All those flashes of memories, curiosity, longing, have brought me here to live my dreams, my motherland; those sights and smells have become a part of my daily existence. All the strange things that have happened along the way have dumped us here to this cheap cracked-plaster place at the wooden table, to the sounds of the neighbors screaming at each other in a barely discernible dialect. But ah, the prosciutto…at last, I can eat all I ever wanted without the greedy eyes all around me.

Have I brought us to this place or was it Nana guiding my hand? I think if it was her, we would somehow have returned to Vicin’ di Napoli and not Rome, with all its uptight beauty.