The Journey Home Making a New Life in the Old Country

[lsanderson]

The Journey Home Making a New Life in the Old Country
By JOYCE WADLER

CALITRI, Italy

THE story of the unmarried American woman and the Italian grandparents she never knew and the home she has made for herself in this small mountain village in Southern Italy began one Thanksgiving holiday when she was traveling alone.

You might say it is odd, to go off by yourself on the most family-oriented holiday of the year, and Angela Paolantonio, a Los Angeles photographers’ representative with a shock of black curls and a tendency to worry about other people’s feelings first and her own later, would agree. But she needed, in a very bad way, to get out of Dodge. She was 41, she hadn’t had a serious relationship in years and she had no desire to be what she calls the spinster at the table. Although she had a fine arts degree and considered herself an artist, she’d never focused on her own work. She was proud of her small stable of photographers and graphic artists, but the business part was hardly creative, and a lot of being an agent is being mother, shrink, confessor; she’d be on the phone for hours, going through their divorces.

The visit to her grandparents’ village, which has a population of about 6,000 and lies an hour and a half east of Naples, was intended as a day trip, an add-on to two weeks knocking around Italy, punctuated by a Thanksgiving dinner of a tuna sandwich in Rome. She arrived in town not knowing if there were even any family members left, stepping off a bus so early in the morning that only the fruit vendor was on the street. Nor could she speak more than a few words of Italian. But the ones she knew were the ones that mattered: “Paolantonio” and “famiglia.” More