Falconara: A Family Odyssey

Rating:
Summary: an excellent view of growing up in Chicago
Review: "We were not only different from our Irish and Polish neighbors, we were also different from the other Italian immigrants... While they spoke Italian at home and on the streets, we spoke an unusual Albanian dialect in our home, one called "Arberesh". It was a dialect that few outside of our family understood. This, particularly, troubled me. It was easier for my brother Tony, who was a good baseball player and found himself quickly accepted into most circles thanks to that talent. My sisters and I struggled. ...Our family was different.We were not part of two cultures, but of three, and this caused us great conflict."

Rose Musacchio Higdon, whose parents immigrated from Falconara-Albanese, a village in Calabria, writes of these cultures and conflicts.

The focal point of her interest in her "roots" was the legend of the seven founding families of Falconara as told to her by her mother. "Many generations ago, seven families fled Albania to escape a Turkish invasion. ... The seven families sailed around the boot of Italy and up that country's western coast. ... Beaching their boat, the families began a new life in a new land. ...".

Rose Musacchio related the legend to her history professor at Chicago Teachers College. "That must have happened in the fifteenth century," he speculated. "Thats when the Turks conquered the Balkans." These few words gave the legend new validity. After raising a family, Rose inquired into her family heritage and into the origins of the Musacchio family.

She writes of Albanian history and the circumstances leading to the exodus of Albanians to Italy.

Of special interest is her descriptions of village life in Falconara. She writes of the mistrust between Italians and the Italo-Albanese, whom the Italians called "Ghegi". Her first look at Falconara gave the impression of a coarse, ugly place. Later she saw the beaty of it especially the vistas of the farmlands and the sea. She describes the procession of the "Madonna del Buonconsiglio", part of a festival held each September. She writes of her father, who as a young man in Chicago, enlists in the Italian army, and proudly serves as a Bersaglieri (an elite corp) for four years in the Alps during World War I.

She writes of growing up in Chicago, living above their shoe repair and dry cleaning shop. As a teenager her father insisted that she, of the three sisters, learn to drive because, they later learned, he was going blind from diabetes. Of her mother who held a high regard for education and "worked" the Chicago school system so that her girls would go to a new and better school.

"Falconara" is reminiscent, with a female perspective, of the book "Unto Thy Sons" by Gay Talese. Both tell of growing up in America during the forties and fifties and of their roots in Italy. Several interesting parallels of the two works, --- both writers lived above dry cleaning shops, are about the same age, published their work at about the same time, and the town "Maida", of principal interest in Talese's work, is less than 32 miles from Falconara.