31.8 Day of the Dead, sorta. But not depressing :)

Today I took Mamma down to register with the vigili. If you’re going to be in one place here for more than 8 days you have to tell the cops. The vigili weren’t home by the time we got there so we left a message and walked around Pellegrino looking at stuff and seeing if we could find some more American plug to Italian outlet adapters. (Pay attention: this becomes important soon.) We got a couple ungrounded ones, but no one had a grounded one for the computers (we got one in Naples when we had only one computer, but now that the boxes have arrived we need two).

 Upon our return and after lunch Rose, Mamma and I decided to go for a walk. Ro came with us, and we walked up the hill on a road we hadn’t investigated before. Mamma and Ro got tired and went back down the hill after a bit, but I carried on up the hill until I got to an enormous house with a swimming pool, seemingly just a few hundred meters from another village. I decided to walk up to said village. It wasn’t. It was the farm compound, I’m guessing, of the huge house. The road petered out there, but another branch went up behind the house. Another adventure for the next time I go walking.

On the way home as I came down the hill towards Besozzola I saw Mamma and Rose on the other side of a depression in the hillside, about 150m away from where I was. I stopped to wave and heard Rose say, perfectly clearly, “Mamma’s over there.” She wasn’t shouting. She was just telling my mother in a perfectly normal conversational tone of voice. I said, equally conversationally, “Rosie, look up.” She did.

A natural whispering gallery. We chatted across it for a few minutes just because we could, though at first Rose was completely confused because she couldn’t figure out how I had gotten from one side to the other so fast – otherwise how would she be able to hear me? Then I came down and around to see what Mamma was looking at. She was next to the engineer’s house. He had painted a bunch of engineering tools and formulas on the side of his house. She said, “Harris would have loved this.” Yesterday was the one year anniversary, you see. I added, “And the whispering gallery too.” So we stood there in the sunshine for a little while and remembered. It was nice.

It seemed only appropriate at that point to go down the hill into the big field towards the village cemetery. It’s little, and not terribly old, as European cemeteries go – earliest grave is 1890. But it’s really interesting to note the local burial customs. Every grave from about 1925 on has a silver-mounted cameo photograph of the deceased, all terribly stern and taking it very seriously. A few babies; a few young men dead in WWI or WWII; but mostly citizens of advanced age staring out at you and making you VERY aware of slouching and not having brushed your teeth adequately. There were a couple very elderly women who died in the late 1980s who looked like they were from the 1780s, in their long heavy black dresses and enormous headscarves. Only the very most recent pictures were in color (one from February of this year); all the others were black and white. The tombs in the ground were almost all big headstones with slabs over the actual casket, and most of them had an electric light in the shape of a wall sconce or a torch burning below the names. I suppose you endow the tomb or something to pay the light bill. “I tuoi cari” – your loved ones – appears on most stones; not unlike the Romans’ tombstones, it assumes you can manage to add “miss you” or “remember you” or similar sentiments on your own. All the most recent burials were in a mausoleum wall, but clearly inhumations, not cremations – the niches in the wall were clearly wide and deep enough for caskets. They'll have to expand before too long, though -- only about 35 niches left!