On the Chessboard of Life: Tales as Pawns

By Luisa Ranieri

The book was published in Italy by the "Città del Sole" Publishing House of Reggio Calabria in July of this year, in print only and is achieving great success both with bookstore sales and online sales on Amazon.

It is part of the series "La vita narrata" and talks about the story of my Grandfather Daniele, who emigrated to New Jersey in 1910 and returned to his native Calabria in 1953 after 43 years of America, finds himself living the last years in an alienating way of life, no longer feeling completely Calabrese and not even Italian and least of all American .

There are four reading levels:

1)alongside his personal one there is the story of the numerous grandchildren who surround him and love him but at the same time fear him because of his grumpy and irascible character.
2)In the background, the village of Satriano is represented, located in the Serre Aspromontane, in poverty because it has been bled by emigration, as a result of which it is mostly populated by wives left alone with their children, often small.
The emigration is also narrated through the photographic documentation of the papers belonging to Grandfather and through that of the "ships" he took to go to America.
3)The last level of reading is that of Satriano's historical cultural roots in which the narrating voice, which is mine as a Latin and Greek scholar, reconnects the threads that lead back to the great Classical Greek culture of origin.

A book, therefore historical-biographical but also of formation of the gang of cousins who grow up without too many controls trying to understand and interpret the life that surrounds them and who find in it the roots of their future (Rosanna, for example, will choose as an adult emigrate like her as my grandfather to America, while I, Luisa, will never want to break away from Italy but, due to family events, I will at the same time become a "citizen of the world").

The writing of the book was requested by my niece Daniela who lives in California and who wanted me to tell her the story of her father Daniele as a child, my brother.

It is dedicated, in order:
1) to migrants of yesterday and today
2) to Daniele, who died in California last February of a fulminant heart attack and to whom I also dedicated the back cover with the poem that inspired me about his story and that of the other deceased relatives of our family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664166011

Luisa Ranieri

Luisa Ranieri, locrese by birth, lived since adolescence first in Bologna and then in the hinterland Milanese, has always nurtured a great passion for the Culture of the Mediterranean, reminiscing of the magno-greca origin of the native land. She graduated from Bologna University in Ancient Letters, taught for almost her entire life in the Classical Section of the Primo Levi Lyceum of San Donato Milanese. Accomplices her many trips to the USA, Canada, England and France, home to a part of her branched family, she was able to enrich her worldview with the juxtaposition of European and American Culture, modern and contemporary, through the literature that is always an expression of it.

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 by Luisa Ranieri.

Cover by Concetta Ranieri

Backcover by Daniele Ranieri Jr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 04/16/2021

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

823737

Contents

Introduction

1. At Satriano

2. The Palace

3. The Bill

4. In Grandpapa’s Wake

5. The Old Mother

6. Grandpapa’s Wrath

7. The Battalion of the Justices

8. The Theater as a Representation of Itself

9. Migrants of Yesterday and Today

10. The Wind Comes Bearing the Sound of the Hour

11. Death as a Show

12. The Future Has an Ancient Heart

13. Our Affective Education

14. The Pseudo-Revelation

15. The Exception

16. Uncle Dominick’s Shop

17. The Scapegoat

18. The Coffee

19. The Majesty of the Women of Satriano

20. Somewhere Over the Rainbow

21. New Year’s Fires

22. Laughing Corrects Morals

23. The Challenge

24. The Strange Weaves of Hate and Love

25. The Checkers Game

26. Italian Pride

27. I’m Fascinated by the Mystery of Lives

28. With This Foreigner’s Face, I’m Just a Real Man

29. But in the Meantime He flees, He Flees the Irreparable Time

PHOTO DOCUMENTATION

People

Places

Travels

Between Italy and America

Transatlantic

Historical Sources

Literary Quotes

Acknowledgments

This is an autobiographical memoir. Places, times, events, and characters narrated are true, or verisimili.¹ The interpretation of the whole, on the contrary, belongs to me, who have always recognized the validity of Pirandellian reflection on the Truth: I am the one who others believe I am.

The Author

To the migrants of yesterday and today

To my niece Daniela,

who

from abroad

wants to know

To Daniele, my brother,

who

abroad

went to die

I have the dimension of what I see.

A. Caeiro, B. Soares, F. Pessoa

The Book of Restlessness

Introduction

What an immense mental power goes from the pit of deep emotions to the height of the stars that reflect themselves in it, and that, in a way, are there contained.

The words used by B. Soares/F. Pessoa commenting on the thought of Alberto Caeiro have come to cross in my mind with the vision on Facebook on the site Terreioniche of a film featuring the village of Satriano, in the province of Catanzaro. I then shared that documentary with Daniela, my niece, who is now living abroad; I even added a few posts on a past I lived right in that place.

Daniela, as usual, prodded me to write even of that remote experience so that I, taken by total fascination, undertook the task, and in only three days and three nights of total apnea from present and in an equally total dive to a time that is no longer there, but that for me is always there, because, for good and for bad, it contributed to the formation of my being today.

It is precisely in virtue of this conviction that I have decided to turn a private conversation into a book that started from events spatially restricted to a small village in Calabria of the fifties of the last century, can speak to a more extensive and contemporary populace, and make it discover the kinship between the immensely small and the immensely large that exists in the village, metaphorical and not, of each of us precisely, because in it, you can see more world than from the city and because of it, the village is bigger than the city.

1. At Satriano

Every afternoon on Saturday, after school, Papà would load us on the Fiat 600 and would take us to visit Grandpapa in Satriano.

It was a routine that us children would accept not always willingly because it meant leaving our buddies in Locri and, especially in the summer, our sea while our cousins in Satriano at the same time went down to enjoy the Jonio on the fabulous beaches of Soverato.

We would sulkily follow the coastal Jonica until the turn of the Ancinale, where in our minds a miracle would occur: we were about to access the Myth along the banks of that famous river where, as our young cousin Pino assured us, in ancient times, the mighty warships of the Romans entered or exited, either returning from or ready for battle. We had never understood from which battle, but we saw them go up and down the course of the river; we saw the Romans armed with shiny armor and bronze shields, and this nourished our fantasy of ineffable anticipations and expectations.

And then up, up toward the hill among yellow fields of summer stubble or verdant in the other seasons until, surpassing the dangerous curve called ꞌu giruni, we would surrender to the fact that we had definitely left the sea behind and were about to step into another world.

A few meters after the entrance of the village, after passing the Convent of the Nuns, we headed safely toward Ruga di Puccio,² that is toward the widening, where the imposing (by then) Grandpapa’s Palace stood, surrounded by the tiny houses of other inhabitants.

Even with regard to that Puccio, we had asked ourselves several times, however in vain, who was or had been that man so important as to receive the high honor of the title of an entire subdivision, but as for the Ancinale, ignorance of the facts instead of derogate our imagination magnified it disproportionately.

And that new world greeted us with a scent and music that we would never encounter again in our lives: the warm aroma of a sawmill, so similar to that of freshly baked bread, and the music of cutting the timber that made it as a leitmotif to all our sojourns up there.

And already from that first olfactory impact, we grasped the difference in the atmosphere that would welcome us up that hill contrasted to that, which we were leaving behind, towns that basked and sprawled over our sea.

In fact, with the surrounding mountain, it greeted us with the intense fragrances of its fir trees, its larches, its beech trees, its oaks, and the penetrating green of its forests.

Its lands were no longer white, but reddish of dust that had been carried there from the Sahara by the wind who knows how many centuries before.

We had gone from our white mountain Aspromontana to those mountain ranges of the