Commentary on “Four Poems from Adami”

Adami, the home of my Italian family, is a very small village in the mountains above Nicastro, in Decollatura, province of Catanzaro in Calabria. It is just north of the center of the narrowest part of the foot of the Italian boot. The mountain slopes there are thick with chestnut trees and the local, Calabrian pine (the pina calabra of the poems), part of the largest surviving forest in Europe. My guess is that the Ananias brought their Greek name to the Gulf of St. Eufemia sometime before the 4^th century B.C. during the colonization of Magna Graecia. My last name, always an oddity in America, was part of the town at its founding. The first adamaru, in Calabrese a native of Adami, buried under the floor of the local church was an Anania, so was the last.

A national road curves around the downhill side of the town. The grey stucco backs of its oldest houses—still, Anania houses—edge the roadway. At Carmelo's house a single road, via Carducci, runs uphill past his garden toward the church, Santa Maria di Carmela, and its small square. Two-thirds of the way up, the road divides, circles past the church and bends back down and rejoins itself. The pavement is steep, with a heavily aggregated asphalt that crunches underfoot. At the turn in the road, a paper notice glued like a political poster to a concrete retaining wall commemorates a family reunion. All the names on the notice are names from my childhood and my more immediate family in Omaha. Uphill, just below the church, the town's grandest house is the childhood home of the poet, Michele Pane (1876-1953). A plaque on the front of the house quotes a passage about Adami from his poem to his daughter, Libertá. Part of the appeal of that particular Pane poem for me is that it was written after his exile in America—in my family's Italian neighborhood in Omaha, then in Chicago—so the poem and the plaque connect his two worlds and mine. In it he's telling his daughter what to look for, who to embrace when she visits Adami. I only have ever had one photograph from Adami, a harsh pre-1920s print on stiff paper, a dark house-front on a hill with two unrecognizable, inky figures at its far corner. I carried it with me there, stood where the camera had to have been and looked at the house and the photograph in turn. I have no idea how I came to have it. The house in picture is Pane's, not one of the Anania houses down the hill, and I assume one of its shadowy figures is the poet.

These four poems deal with my relatives there. Carmelo is a Scalzo, but is still a cousin. Everyone in Adami is at least a distant cousin. Filomena, Felice and Raffaele are all Ananias. At the close of an extraordinary day among the family, we had chestnuts gathered from the mountain side roasted over the embers of Raffaele's fire on a three legged iron stand that could easily have been Roman. He took the chestnuts from the hearth and rolled them in newsprint. The husks simply flaked off and were left curled over the day's news as we ate. Raffaele agreed to read to us from Michele Pane's poetry, in Calabrese, the dialect in which Pane spoke and wrote and which his poems may finally help preserve. There are linguists in Italy who argue that Neopolitan, Calabrian and Sicilian are not dialects of Italian but parts of a separate language, which has its own dialects. The differences between standard Italian and Calabrian are great enough that the edition of Pane's selected poems, Musa Silvestra, published in Rome, is bi-lingual, on facing pages Calabrian and Italian, with an extensive Calabrian-Italian glossary following the poems. Calabrese sounds different; it has a different stock of vowels, compressed initial consonants and a different pace, so many of the closing syllables you expect of Italian are elided. Hearing it spoken there, not in Omaha where it has had its residence in my memory, it seemed an inherent feature of the place, earthy as the afternoon's porcini, airy and nocturnal as warm chestnuts. Hearing Pane, whose images the landscape and the town rehearsed for me at every step while I was there, read in Calabrese, fused poem and place completely, as though each were an extension of the other “ppe tiempu e luntananzu” (“through time and distance”).

Michael Anania