But it wasn't world history that drew me to Troina, it was trying to reconnect with a place that was lost to me and my family. As someone who grew up in San Diego, 3,000 miles away from my extended family in New Jersey, any snippet of family history was interesting to me, as the people my parents would speak of were people I would see once a year, at best. In the meantime, our traditions and food were touchstones to a distant past.
I remember in eighth grade doing a family research project - one in which we researched our family tree, and learning the various names of ancestors and whatnot - meeting with a researcher of family names who was able to provide backgrounds on the varying names to all the other kids in the class, but to him, my last name was a mystery. And that describes a lot of my Italian heritage - a complete and utter mystery. I knew my dad was Italian, and I sure as heck looked Italian, but was there more to it than that?
As I grew older, my research methods got better - at one point in time, 60% of my job was online research and I am still quite good at it - and I began to look for the places I had heard about through family lore. While one side of the Italian family was wreathed in secrecy, the Sicilian side seemed easier. They were from the town of Traina. They left in the early 1900s, and my great-grandmother went back there for a trip to visit family after WW2, and found her sisters living better than she did.
But that created a new barrier for me. The name Traina does not appear on any map. But there was a town called Troina. It was in the right part of Sicily, and when I looked up the most common surnames, I found that 20% of the town had the same last name as my grandmother's family. Jackpot. As it turns out, Troina is the Italian translation of the Sicilian Traina (something that I didn't realize until the very last day of my visit).
The next step back to Troina came when my cousins, one of whom was working as a photographer in Egypt during the Iraq War, travelled to Troina to get documents to potentially become Italian citizens. When they (and my aunt and uncle) went to Troina we got confirmation that Traina was Troina, and they met with cousins who shared pictures my great-grandmother left with them back in the 1950s.
In addition to old pictures, we were able to gather the story about my great-grandparents. My great-grandfather was exceptionally poor, and had to make the choice between staying in the town he was born in, grew up in, and built a life in, and watching his family starve to death. In fact, the dividing line between my great-grandfather (the ironically named Fortunato) and his brother, Francesco, was a donkey. Francesco owned a donkey, and knew he could be hired to haul things. My great-grandfather did not. So off to America he went, along with my indomitable great-grandmother, Giuseppa, and their oldest daughter (and my great-aunt) Lena.
From that point on, I did everything I could to learn about Troina. I learned about the Oasis (the town's largest employer) which treats children with mental disabilities, and how the town has survived when other similar towns have died. Through the contacts my cousins made, I used social media to connect with distant cousins and joined Facebook groups to connect with people I never met, who live in a town I had never seen.
When Troina started offering homes for 1 Euro, I scoured the website and dreamed. (Quick note on that: as a practical matter, the 1 Euro thing doesn't make that much sense because the fully refurbished homes are relatively inexpensive anyway). I could return to the town my great-grandparents had to leave.
So, when my father and his cousins decided to go to Troina for a family reunion, I had to join them.
NOTE: Based on this prologue, I suspect this blog post will be rather long, so I've decided to split it into parts.
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