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In search of his lost heritage, the great-grandson of Sicilian immigrants finds rich history and warm welcome amid distant relatives in his ancestral homeland.
By MARK PETTY
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 26, 2002
More than 100 years ago, a neophyte Roman Catholic priest was commanded by his superiors to slaughter a kid goat for dinner. This created a dilemma for the young man. It was, after all, Friday, when eating meat was banned. To make matters worse, it was Good Friday. When he protested, he was informed that such prohibitions existed for the peasants, not for the priests.
Disheartened, the priest left the monastery.
His decision to join the priesthood had brought great pride to his Sicilian family. Quitting had the opposite effect. He left his village, Santo Stefano Quisquina. He left Sicily. He came to America. The year was probably 1896.
That young priest-turned-immigrant was Giuseppe Greco, my great-grandfather on my mother's side.
Mom's three other grandparents were also born in Sicily. They also came to America more than 100 years ago. None of them ever went back. Nor did any of their descendants.
I changed that by going to Sicily in the early fall of 2001. I went all the way back -- back to the hamlet of Santo Stefano Quisquina, where the story of the kid goat took place; back to the tinier village of Lucca Sicula, birthplace of my mother's other grandparents, the Mussos and the Bellittis.
Like more and more Americans traveling overseas, I was seeking to reconnect with a lost heritage.
Growing up in a middle-class suburban neighborhood in the Midwest, I knew little about my ancestors and where they came from. But I think of myself as the family historian, and I wanted my children to know that the comfort they enjoy today is possible because of the sacrifices of those who came before.
My 80-year-old mother, Anna, who lives in Tulsa, Okla.,accompanied me to Sicily. She longed to visit the villages she heard her grandparents fondly reminisce about in their native tongue. My brother, Ryan, who lives in Rockford, Ill., came along, too.
My father died in 1995, but he provided further inspiration for the trip: He had flown 50 missions over Sicily and Italy during World War II, then returned to the United States and married my mother in 1945.
The trip last fall exceeded my greatest expectations. It took me months to sort through the unexpected insights the experience bestowed upon me.
As we prepared for the trip, I set out to contact relatives who might still live in Lucca Sicula and Santo Stefano Quisquina. On the Internet I found an Italian phone book that allowed me to perform name searches. In less than 30 minutes I had the names, addresses and phone numbers of about 50 people named Musso, Greco, Albano and Bellitti in those two villages.
With the help of Mom's somewhat rusty Italian, we crafted a letter for each side of her family. The letters explained who our common ancestors might be, when they were born, when they came to America and so forth. The letters included our travel dates and our hotel in Sicily.
Sending these letters proved to be one of the best things we did, and I encourage anyone else considering this kind of trip to do the same.
In early September I received a large envelope from Sicily. It was from a man named Antonio Musso. Musso is Mom's maiden name.
He had sent copies of the birth certificates for one set of my great-grandparents, together with a copy of their marriage certificate. He invited us to meet him and said he would tell us the Musso family genealogy when we arrived in Sicily. Our spirits soared.
Several days later, hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a hillside in Pennsylvania, and for a while we seriously considered postponing the trip. But in the end we reasoned that if my great-grandfather Greco had been so determined to live life on his own terms, we should do the same. We flew to Italy on Sept. 30.
As our flight approached Fiumicino Airport in Rome, I tried to imagine what my anxiety would feel like if multiplied by a factor of 50 -- the number of bombing missions my father flew over Italy between May 5 and Sept. 18, 1943. His fears were real, mine only imagined.
In Rome we visited all the must-see fountains, piazzas and obelisks. We then spent three days on the Amalfi coast, perched high on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, enjoying the prettiest view I've ever seen. Then it was on to our homeland of Sicily.
We landed in Catania on Oct. 7, 2001, arriving in the middle of a drought that would not end.
In an instant I realized this trip had brought my life full circle. I grew up in Oklahoma, a state that is much maligned for the stereotype of poor Dust Bowl refugees immortalized in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. I'm also half Sicilian. Sicily appears to be poorer than mainland Italy and is much maligned as the birthplace of the Mafia. Based on these stereotypes, Oklahoma may be to the United States what Sicily is to Italy.
The morning after we arrived in Catania we met Alfie, the Sicilian guide whose services we had arranged through a Tampa travel agent. Alfie would drive us to the villages of our ancestors.
Alfie was affable, with jet-black hair and a gap between his front teeth. Born in Sicily, he grew up in Australia and speaks English with a delightful Australian accent. I gave him a Yankees cap, and he wore it with pride.
We spent the day touring Taormina, and that evening we enjoyed dinner on a terrace at the Ristorante-Pizzeria Granduca while looking across the Ionian Sea. We relaxed. We felt as if we were at home.
Tuesday we continued to Agrigento, the sister city of Tampa, on Sicily's south-central coast. At the Al Fogher restaurant Alfie ordered our lunch. He knew we did not eat a lot of beef.
The piatti secondi (second plate) looked like beef, and we hesitated.
"It's not beef," said Alfie. "Give it a try."
I did, and so did Ryan, a vegetarian. We nodded our approval. When we finished Alfie informed us it was fresh porcupine from the forest.
At the Villa del Casale we learned that the French did not invent the bikini. Bikinis were worn by Roman women in Sicily in the third or fourth century A.D., as evidenced by many of the villa's huge mosaics. One depicts a bikini-clad woman working out with small, modern-looking dumbbells.
Agrigento was founded by the Greeks in 581 B.C. More than 200,000 people once lived in what the Greek poet Pindar referred to as "the fairest city inhabited by mortals."
When we checked into our hotel, two messages were waiting for us. A man named Bellitti and a woman named Greco had responded to the letters we had written. We would meet them as well.
In the morning we pulled into the parking lot of a gas station and were met by a man who emerged from his well-worn Mercedes. We exchanged hugs while he and Alfie spoke rapid-fire Sicilian to each other. He was Antonio Musso, the long-lost relative who had sent me copies of my great-grandparents' birth certificates.
Antonio is a good-looking man about my age, 48. He has obviously spent countless hours in the sun working on his farm near Lucca Sicula. There he grows olives, almonds and grapes. He has thick black hair and rugged hands. He was wearing blue jeans, a white shirt with blue tattersall print and gold chains.
Antonio told us his great-grandfather, Adriano Musso, and my great-grandfather, Calogero Musso, were first cousins. So now I had a long-lost relative who was treating me like a brother.
Musso is such a common name that each Musso family in Lucca Sicula has a nickname so people can tell the families apart. Years ago the village had a drawing to determine each Musso family's nickname. Our branch of the Mussos drew the word surci out of the hat. It is Sicilian for mouse. In Sicilian, musso is the word for lips. I told Alfie not to call me "mouse lips" because I'm Sicilian and won't tolerate it. He laughed.
Antonio drove us to Lucca Sicula to eat lunch with his family. Lucca Sicula, population 1,800, is a cluster of three- and four-story stucco houses all sharing common walls and butting up against narrow streets. You look both ways before stepping from your house here, in case a car is coming.
Following Sicilian tradition, Antonio lives in the village and drives out to his farm every day to work. Why live alone in the country when he can live in the village near his extended family and friends?
In the third-floor kitchen we met Antonio's wife, Liboria, and 18-month-old son, Giovanni.
The meal to end all meals was being prepared. The antipasto was delicious, and it included sheep's cheese (or pecorino), anchovies and olives. I'm not a wine drinker, but Antonio's wine complemented the food and vice versa. We praised Liboria repeatedly.
I have always heard Italian families are closely knit. Sitting at the table with Antonio and Liboria for two hours, I experienced what a close Italian family feels like. Never have I been made to feel so comfortable by people I have just met. The feeling was magical, relaxing, revelatory.
Walking in the streets of Lucca Sicula after lunch we saw women sitting in chairs in front of their homes, their backs turned to the street. Most disappeared when they saw us approaching.
Alfie explained that according to Sicilian custom, it would be immodest of them to sit with their legs toward the street. He said some of the younger women in the village were getting away from this tradition.
At the intersection of Via Cara and Via Mortille, Antonio pointed to the house on the opposite corner. He told us Mom's grandparents, Calogero Musso and Salvatora Bellitti-Musso, once lived there. It is probably the house in which her father was born.
As we posed for photographs we marveled that Antonio's mother knew where his great-great-great uncle lived more than 100 years ago.
We said goodbye to Antonio and headed toward Santo Stefano Quisquina. Along the way, one of us wondered aloud if we would have done what Antonio did, when a fourth cousin from a foreign country sent an unsolicited letter.
We were embarrassed to think how little we might have done -- but that was before we knew what it really felt like and meant to be Sicilianos.
We arrived in Santo Stefano Quisquina in the late afternoon. My great-grandfather Greco lived the story of the priest and the kid goat in this village.
We walked reverently through the church in which he had worshiped. I considered taking a photograph but resisted the temptation. I chose instead to leave with a memory I'll never forget rather than a photograph that would convey nothing of what I felt.
We went looking for No. 21 Via Romano, the home of Angela Greco, who had left a message at our hotel. Her small flat was full of people that evening. Angela's sister Rosalia and her husband had just arrived from Germany for an extended visit.
There were 12 of us in all. We talked excitedly for hours. The resemblance between Rosalia and my brother provided the best evidence that we are all related: They both have gray hair. Their eyebrows are identical in shape, as well as color -- jet black. They have identical noses, teeth and smiles.
They laughed and posed together for photographs while the rest of us laughed even harder. It was a joyous evening for all of us, and Alfie delivered us to our hotel in Agrigento well after midnight.
We were not done. The next day we met the other side of Mom's family. We ate lunch at an outdoor cafe with Rosario Bellitti, his wife, Liboria, and their son Giuseppe. They, like Angela Greco, had unexpectedly left a message at our hotel. Liboria had spent an incredible amount of time searching town records for information about Mom's grandmother, Salvatora Bellitti, whose house we had seen the day before. She traced our genealogy back into the 1700s.
Based only on photographs, their teenage son, Giuseppe, wanted to come to America and marry my daughter, Lindsay.
In just two days we had met long-lost descendents of three of my mother's four grandparents. The warmth and grace with which they greeted us, and the amount of effort they expended on our behalf, had a humbling, and life-altering, impact on me. Our trip ended in Palermo, a place Dad bombed on May 9, 1943. All we wanted to do was go to the hotel and relax, but Alfie would not allow it. He had many things to show us, among them the port of Palermo, from which my great-grandparents most certainly embarked for America.
And thus I returned to America. I had gone to Sicily in search of one kid goat and returned with a connection to my relatives, past and present. They say you cannot go home again. But you can visit your ancestral homeland for the first time.
My daughter's school offered students a trip to Italy during spring break this April, but because of Sept. 11, too few students signed up and the trip was canceled.
We will find another way for her and her brother to visit Italy. They are, after all, the great-great-grandchildren of Giuseppe Greco, and they should know from where they came.
-- Mark Petty is a photographer who lives in Gulfport.