Maggia: the footsteps of my Swiss Italian ancestry

I went to Switzerland to explore the villages in the Ticinese valleys that my great-grandmother's family emigrated to California from. I always knew that we were Swiss, but in more recent years, I learned more about family history and, in fact, we're Swiss-Italian. Which, somehow was more interesting than a mere fondue eating, yodeling, Heidi ancestry. (Ticino trip pics online.)

Ticino is the Southern most region of Switzerland, in both climate and culture. The language is Italian, albeit a distinct regional dialect. My people hail from hillsides and villages in the Maggia Valley, just north of Lago Maggiore. The lake, less famous than its nearby Lake Como, does just fine without George Clooney starpower, complete with its own stunning charm and beauty. Just the tip of Lago Maggiore is in Switzerland, with most of it stretching down into Italy toward Milan.

One of the things I just had to do on this trip was visit the homeland. It's the most direct geographical tie to any lineage, and the one I know most about. After plenty of online searching, I found a vacation rental apartment in Maggia, the incredibly small town in the valley and along the river of the same name. The rental, Casa alla Cascata, was irresistible. Minutes away from one of the many Ticino waterfalls, and nestled in a town filled with old stone homes. Even more, this is the very town that Great-Grandma Hazel's grandparents were from. I had to stay there. I wanted to walk in the footsteps of my ancestors, the famiglie (families) Giacomini and Garzoli of Maggia.

In the 1880s, a huge number of Ticinese villagers, particularly from the Valle Maggia left seeking opportunity and relief from dire poverty and hunger in flung flung part of the world. The first wave of emigration, which sounds more like a population hemorrhage, went to Australia. The second, went to California, and more specifically to the dairy farms in Marin County. Dairy farming was what they did and what they knew, so tenant farming in California was a natural step. In fact, the stellar cheese culture (really, I couldn't resist the pun) of the San Francisco Bay Area has its roots in immigrant Swiss Italian and Portugese dairy farmers who arrived over a century ago. In fact, Marin's famed Point Reyes blue cheese is made by a Giacomini family. Distant relatives?

(Ticino trip pics online.)

New pics are up.

Pics from Verona, the Trentino, Alto Adige, and Valtellina are up on flickr.

(plus labels on the Ischia and Napoli photos.)

back in san francisco

We've made it back to San Francisco. Bex is back at work tonight, I'm back tomorrow morning.

Parting shots: Becky sipping wine above nebbiolo vineyards at Malvira, in the Langhe region of Piemonte.

And, I'm a handful on a rainy day in Milano.

Pics and stories from Ticino, and other spots still to come...

last day in italy, but the blog posts keep coming

Last day in Milano. Tomorrow morning we head to the notorious Malpensa airport for our flight back to San Francisco.

Milan is weird and fantastic all at the same time. Much funkier than other parts of Italy, but in many ways, it often also seems less Italian.

We've had some great finds here though. CioccolatItaliani is the most amazing gelateria and fountain (literally) of kinds of chocolate goodness. If you're in Milan, this is a must stop. Happy hour is also big here, with aperitivi bars complete with an 8 euro buffet option. Sprinkled around the cool Navigli neighborhood, they're a great way to combine evening drinks with an early light dinner.

Becky found the wine mothership and we spent a good part of the late morning there. The lovely women who work there led us through their several decades old collections of obscure and more well known wines. The woman in the shop kept getting excited talking about wine, but that meant she was talking faster and then it's, well, much harder to follow. (Specifically, she found a shelf of 1996 Produttori del Barbaresco. And for 30 euro. Apparently you can't even buy this vintage in the U.S. anymore, and this wine is a prime example of the kind of good shit the Italians keep mostly for them self. Only 4 cases of a recent Produttori (or PdB as the wine kids call it) vintage go to the U.S. So it's a big wine deal.

I still have a number of back posts written and pictures to upload, so keep checking back. The internet connection at the hotel is impossibly slow, so I'll be lucky if this post uploads, let alone pictures. All the pics will be uploaded after I'm home and back on fast WiFi.

Small towns, no wifi. Quick update.

We've been in small towns around Northern Italy for the last week, and without Internet access. Really nice for getting away, but not so great for keeping a blog updated. Ah well. We're in Piemonte right now, near Alba. We're staying at a small hotel on a hill above a winery, surrounded of course by vineyards.

We've been in the Trentino-Alto Adige and Switzerland, and in the Monferrato area of Piemonte.

See, like I said, quick update. The mornings have been chilly and foggy the last couple days, but the afternoons are sunny and warm, so I've got to go enjoy some of that!

Also, I'm adding in some back posts from Naples, Ischia, Trentino, and Alto Adige. Of course there are also tales to be told from Ticino and Piemonte, so I'm working on them. Tomorrow, we head to Milano, for the last few days of the trip.

(I also uploaded a few more pics to flickr, mostly from Ischia.)

Thinking back on Naples...

I arrived in Naples fully expecting to be ripped off. My guard was up. I clutched my bag tightly, switching it often to be on the building side rather than street side should, lest it be snatched off my shoulder as someone speeds by on a Vespa.

But day after day, I was pleasantly surprised at how nice, and how incredibly warm everyone was. Not in a hustling kind of way. Just molto simpatico. Often with a brusque edge of course, but incredibly lovely none the less.

I thoroughly expected rugged edgy attitude. Naples is gritty, no doubt. But the city itself, and its inhabitants are undeniably warm, if you just give them the tiniest chance. Speaking enough--just barely--Italian to get by was helpful. But it’s amazing how far a per favore, ciao, or grazie mille will go. In Rome, I swear, people were not impressed and really didn’t seem to care if we were trying to speak Italian. In Naples, the effort made a distinct difference.

Flying in, the airport is relatively small, much smaller than, say, Rome’s Fiumicino. And my bag, freakishly, arrived in under 10 minutes. The taxi line outside was just a few steps away and within moments I was on my way to my hotel in the Centro Storico. I’d slept enough on the plane and was feeling brave enough already to take Naples head on and try my Italian out. The cab driver and I ended up chatting all the way to my hotel--all in Italian, though sometimes broken and we had to figure out what each other were saying. There was a soccer game, calcio, that night. Italy vs. Ireland, I think. It was on the radio in the cab. There’s not much traffic tonight, the driver explained, because it’s a big national game and everyone is inside watching it.

I found the epitome of the simultaneous grit and warmth of Naples on a city bus. I need to get a bus from he massively busy and congested Via Toledo, down to the port to catch the ferry to Ischia. I kind of knew where I was going, and I had a bit of a sense of which buses might get me there. I was keeping an eye out for bus 24 or 201. Quickly enough, one arrived. I asked the driver, “Va al porto?” “Vicino” (nearby) he replied, and waved me on board. I lug my bag on, and find a seat. After a few stops, and twists and turns of the route, I asked the driver “puo dirmi la fermata per il porto” (Can you tell me which stop for the port. Or close enough to that.) Two more stops he tells me. I return to my seat. All this and the conversation to follow in Italian, and to my delight, I’m keeping up.

An old man sitting across from me asks me if I’m going to the port. Yes, I tell him. Due piu, he tells me, two more, and holds up two fingers, to make sure I understand when I need to get off the bus.

“Vado al porto,” says a woman sitting behind me, joining the conversation.

The old man across the aisle says “Segui a lei,” follow her. This is quickly becoming a quintessentially Italian moment.

At my stop, the woman motions for me to follow her, as does the old man. The bus drivers calls back to me that this is the stop. So fantastic.

The woman goes on to literally lead me to the port. She’s going to Ischia too, so I should follow her to the ferry. After exiting the bus, she leads me, of course, through the most fully Naples-style human frogger experience of crossing the busy street.

Her name is Carmelina, and we talk a bit on the way to the ferry. “Capisci italiano,” you understand Italian, she says. “Un po’.” A little. “Brava,” she says. I fully savor the compliment from this Southern Italian woman. She looks back every so often as we make our way a couple blocks to the biglietteria, ticket stand at the port.

See, the thing about Naples is that much of it is crumbling and a bit tattered, but charming in subtle yet undeniable ways. Most notably, Naples is incredibly ALIVE. The the echoes of scooters and honking bouncing through narrow streets, mixed with the expressive chatter street vendors and people going about the day. Constantly huffing diesel fumes and cigarette smoke. A rich and warm palette of colors on buildings lining the incredibly narrow but orderly streets first laid out by the Greeks, and in the apartment buildings winding up into the hills.

This is not a place that will blunt the senses. It will hit them all. And it’s lovely. Intense, but lovely.

Romping in i Dolomiti

Alto Adige
Dude, it’s like we teleported to Germany. Or Austria. But this just barely feels like Italy. As soon as you cross into the Italian province of the Alto Adige, all of a sudden the street signs are in both Italian and German. And the local accent sounds like, well, imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger saying “Buon Giorno” or “Arrividerci” and there you have it. Spot on.

We stayed in the small town of Terlano. Terlan in the German, at a little hotel surrounded, yet again, by vineyards and apple orchards.

Becky visited Cantina Terlan in the afternoon. I took a nap.

Trentino
The Trentino Alto-Adige area is actually two regions in one, in Northeastern Italy. The further north you we went up the valley along the Adige River, the increasingly Germanic / Austrian like things become. In fact, this region was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until after World War I, when it became a part of Italy. Why exactly that is I don’t know, and my Internet time is limited, otherwise I’d be thoroughly looking into this. (Feel free to fact check me on this, or add more info in the comments.) But the point is that everything starts changing. This doesn’t look, sound or sometimes even taste like other parts of Italy.

The architecture is different. The steeples of the church rise higher, and to incredibly narrow sharp points. Pedestrians tend to walk half way down the block to the crosswalk, and be somewhat mindful of traffic--a huge contrast to much of the rest of Italy, and definitely parts further south where you just step into traffic where and when ever you need to cross, and somehow it all works out, with the cars and the humans on off interweaving and unfurling in a chaos that becomes almost logical. Not so in the Sud Tirol, as this northern region is also known.

This is Dolomites country: the distinctive craggy mountain range that, from what I’ve read, is actually rockified (my word) coral from ancient seabeds. Again go for the factchecking. I tend to give the guidebooks a lot of leeway.

We picked up the rental car in Verona and Becky braved the A22 autostrada, then a smaller, more scenic (and non-toll) highway. We stopped for lunch in a super cute town off the highway SS12, Rovereto. We picked a lunch spot out of the Slow Travel guide to locande and osterie, which we’re thumbing through to find awesomely cute and small authentic local spots. In Rovereto we had lunch at this great enoteca. I had a risotto with leeks made from barley, rather than the usual arborio rice. I had a glass of Nosiola, a white wine grown nearby in the hills rolling along the east side of the Adige river. Becky had grilled tacchino, with grilled patate and cavolfiore gratino (cauliflower gratin). She was kinda sure tacchino was turkey, but not entirely. When we got back to the car, her guess was confirmed.

After lunch, we headed to Lavis, a small town surrounded by peculiarly small and tidy, trained rows of newly flowering apples trees on the valley floor. The Dolomites rising sharply to the West. And rolling hills covered in rows of grape vines for as far as you can see. Lagrein. Schiava. Nosiola. Traminer Aromatico. These are some of the grapes that are grown locally.

The Lavis winery was our host. We toured and tasted the winery, along with Sylvia, our new friend from Winnipeg.

We stayed two nights at a lovely spot nestled in the hills, as always, surrounded by vineyards and with a crystal clear view of the stunning, snow topped Dolomites.