Unto the Sons (29 page)

Joseph noticed that his grandparents were very relaxed in this setting. And indeed, Domenico’s reserved and confident moneylender’s manner, fortified no doubt by the fact that a few of the younger Ciriacos (including Torquato) were mildly in his debt, induced a certain pluckiness and perhaps undue familiarity on his part toward his titled hosts; whereas Domenico’s wife, the blue-eyed and genteel Ippolita—the progeny of a grandmother’s mésalliance long before with a secondary scion of the Gagliardi family of Pizzo—greeted her hosts with modesty and grace, as if assured of her welcome at such receptions as the one the Ciriacos were generously providing, at whatever strain to their solvency, on this bountiful Christmas morning.

Joseph’s mother never attended these festivities. By nature shy, and even more so during the prolonged absences of her husband, Marian preferred spending Christmas in the unornamented surroundings of her own parents’ house to visiting palazzos in the custody of her overbearing father-in-law. And so, while her favorite son and most frequent escort, Sebastian, helped her bundle the younger children into a carriage that would carry them downhill to the farmhouse of her family, the Rocchinos, she permitted young Joseph to accompany his paternal grandparents to the palazzos, knowing he liked to be with them at such social gatherings, wearing custom-made clothing and listening to accomplished musicians.

Maida was too small to support its own concert hall, but those professional singers and instrumentalists born and trained in the area who returned each Christmas to visit their parents were invited to appear as honored guests at various palazzos. And a kind of competition had developed gradually among palazzo owners, as each was eager to provide the finest music in the town. On this particular night at the Ciriacos’ residence there was a retired but still vibrant soprano who had been featured not long before at La Scala opera house in Milan; while at the Vitales’ would be heard a Mozart piano recital given by the son of a local music teacher who, as an emerging pianist on tour in northern Italy, had received acclaim as a soloist earlier in the year in Bologna.

At the Farao palazzo, the crowd was introduced to a robust young baritone who had recently made his debut at the San Carlo opera house in Naples, and was now, through the Faraos’ open windows, belting arias by Rossini and Donizetti across the square and into the not always appreciative ears of the owners of the Ciriaco and Vitale palazzos.

Along with the music and food, the hosts offered their guests brief sightseeing tours through the spacious houses and verdant courtyards.
Wishing on his first visit to see all that he could, Joseph convinced his grandparents to ascend the grand staircases of three or four mansions before morning and, with countless other visitors, to traipse through the moldering but magnificent rooms with their frescoed walls, coffered ceilings, fading emblazoned tapestry, and ornately carved gilt Baroque furniture designed in Naples two and three centuries before, when that proud capital was the most populated city in Europe next to Paris, and in Italy second only to Rome as a center of patronage for artists.

On the walls of these deteriorating palazzos in Maida, as well as in hundreds of other palazzos in the towns and villages of the fallen kingdom, hung heroic portraits and other reminders of the affluence and style of old Naples: contented faces of the bejeweled seventeenth-century Spanish viceroys and the eighteenth-century Bourbon kings who ruled the realm; stoical faces of Christian martyrs who catered to the zealous Hispanic religiosity of Naples’ Catholic court; and other vivid depictions of men and women who personified the good life and the good death in those years prior to the defeat of the kingdom in 1861 by invading soldiers subsidized by northern Italian money and inspired by Garibaldi. The unification of Italy, as Domenico often emphasized to Joseph, did nothing for the south except sink it further into poverty and despair. Naples lost its throne, its autonomy, and its importance as a center of trade and patronage; and its once thriving seaport was now principally active as a point of embarkation for emigrants.

More than a million native-born Italians were already in the United States, with many others in South America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The overwhelming majority of these outflowing Italians were from the disenfranchised Bourbon kingdom of the south—farmers’ sons, for the most part, toiling in faraway factories and mines to support themselves and their families; and Domenico could only lament this situation and belatedly resent that so many of his fellow citizens back in 1860 had allowed General Garibaldi to think, on that warm day of his speech in Maida, that their applause was sincere. Domenico was convinced it was not.

And he could see confirmation of his belief all around him on this early Christmas morning, in these palazzos, where—in contrast to the Garibaldi plaque on the Farao palazzo’s exterior wall, and the sign bearing the general’s name in the public square—the interior walls displayed no heroic portraits or tributes to the conquering general. Inside the palazzos, close to the true sentiments and hearts of the people, were paintings and
decorative tapestries that evoked a spirit of nostalgia for the old regime and for the Baroque period in which it flourished.

On the walls of the Ciriaco ballroom was a large oil painting of a procession of courtiers and cavalrymen leading the first Spanish Bourbon ruler of Naples, King Charles, into that city in 1734. And here, too, was a portrait of Charles’s son and successor, the devout if slovenly Ferdinand, who was chased into Sicily by the French, where he prayed to Saint Francis while his wife took opium.

In addition to the regal portraits there were many other mementos and relics of the old regime on display in the palazzos of Maida; and as the crowds of Christmas visitors continued the festive tour from mansion to mansion, their hosts seemed to take pleasure in explaining the historical significance of each artifact and heirloom.

At the Vitale palazzo it was pointed out that the enameled gold fan encased in glass atop the piano had once belonged to King Ferdinand’s wife, Marie Caroline, who had received it as a gift from her sister, Marie Antoinette. Also in the Vitale palazzo, hanging over a mantelpiece, were British muskets and bayonets that had been used during the 1806 battle of Maida, after which the victorious British commander, General John Stuart, stayed in the mansion as an honored guest.

A noteworthy victim of morbidly operatic years in Italian history was memorialized in the Farao palazzo by a diamond-studded gold snuffbox exhibited in a display case on the wall of an alcove. A member of the Farao family told the Christmas visitors that this snuffbox had been the property of Napoleon’s brother-in-law Joachim Murat.

Murat’s name was legendary in southern Italy. Although he was part of the secular French regime in Naples that closed down monasteries and banned chaplains from the military, as king he nonetheless held the dramatic interest of his Italian subjects with his theatrical flair in court, his chivalrous valor on the battlefield, and finally the melodramatic circumstances of his death—an event that he himself directed in the courtyard of a castle, downhill from Maida, in the village of Pizzo.

Murat died in 1815. Seven years earlier, in the autumn of 1808, having been placed on the southern Italian throne by Napoleon, Murat was greeted by cheering crowds who were dazzled by the sight of him riding through the triumphal arches of Naples attired in one of his many glittering costumes—a gold-embroidered tunic topped by a scarlet velvet cloak; riding boots of bright yellow leather; a scimitar-shaped sword with a diamond hilt; and a three-cornered hat with ostrich feathers and a diamond
buckle. His long dark hair flowed in curling locks, while his otherwise youthfully pallid countenance was solemnized by a whiskered jaw bearing a scar—the sign of an injury from a pistol fired by a Turk during the French invasion of Egypt in 1799.

Murat had been at Napoleon’s side in that conflict, as he would be in many conflicts to follow—from the coup d’état by which Bonaparte seized control of the French government, to the disastrous march into Russia that presaged the decline of Napoleon’s entire empire. By the late spring of 1815, Murat had been driven out of Italy by forces loyal to the exiled King Ferdinand; and when the elderly Spanish Bourbon monarch returned to Naples from Palermo in June of that year, the Catholic populace accepted him as their ruler by divine right. In all the churches, Te Deums were sung; and when Ferdinand first appeared in the royal box at the San Carlo, the opera house built by his father, Charles, the audience stood cheering for more than half an hour. Ferdinand was very appreciative and moved by their reaction. There were tears in his eyes.

But four months later, in early October 1815, Murat left his hideout in Corsica and sailed south, past Maida toward the adjacent beachfront of Pizzo. He was accompanied by only thirty men in two ships; but—as the great Bonaparte had proved after escaping Elba—remarkable things were possible with a minimum of men. Murat believed that he had the charisma and power to repossess the Italians. He was under the illusion that as a king he had been loved, particularly in this area around Maida and Pizzo, where he had been enthusiastically welcomed whenever he passed through the valley with his cavalry and retinue.

It was nearly noon, on a bright Sunday morning, as Murat climbed out of his boat and walked knee-deep in the water toward the beach and the town of Pizzo. Church bells were ringing. The square was crowded with people going to Mass or taking a leisurely
passeggiata
. It was also market day, and dozens of noisy vendors were touting their wares under tent-covered wagons, and a small band was playing on the steps of the municipal building, over which was flying the recently unfurled Bourbon flag of King Ferdinand.

Crossing through the square, on her way home after attending an early Mass and completing her shopping, was the grandmother of Domenico Talese’s wife, Ippolita. Her name was Maria; she had been born in the countryside north of Maida in 1777, the daughter of the caretaker of a ducal estate. Maria had been living in Pizzo with her husband, an enfeebled but active municipal bureaucrat named Vincenzo Gagliardi, one of the unendowed younger sons of the prestigious Gagliardi
family, which occupied a palazzo in the nearby clifftop town of Vibo Valentia.

As Murat arrived with his troops at the seafront edge of the square, and momentarily observed the preoccupied gathering of people moving back and forth before him (while his black boots and white nankeen trousers were still dripping with water), Maria was walking in his direction, carrying groceries and flowers, intent on arriving at her small house below the square in time to prepare for the visitors her husband had invited to lunch. With her eyes downcast, as modesty required, she walked right past the former king and his troops without any awareness of their presence, and she had practically disappeared down the stone staircase that led from the square to her house before she abruptly stopped, hearing what resembled the sharp popping sound of a pistol.

Turning, she saw from a distance of perhaps fifty yards two rows of soldiers standing at attention, their muskets held in front of their faces in a vertical line, but their uniforms of differing colors and styles. In front of them, pointing a small smoking pistol in the air, was a sable-clad soldier with a tasseled coat and plumed hat, who announced vigorously and repeatedly to the crowd:

“Viva il nostro re Gioacchino!”
—Long live our king, Joachim!

Hundreds of people in the square suddenly turned toward the soldiers, astonished and confused. There was much murmuring and sighing from the crowd as the soldier with the pistol bowed toward the flaunting figure that approached him, a proud man wearing a light blue tailcoat with gold epaulets and a large tricorn hat gleaming with a cockade of gems. Maria recognized him immediately.

In past years she had sometimes stood among the roadside spectators watching Murat lead his cavalcade toward one of his military outposts in the mountains; and once, at a town reception in his honor, held in the public garden across from Palazzo Gagliardi, she had passed through his receiving line and had curtsied before him. But now in the square of Pizzo, on this late Sunday morning, she was inclined to back away with fear as the crowd began to react to Murat with hostile comments, and even obscenities, after he had called out to them: “Do you not recognize me? Do you not recognize your own king?”

“Ferdinand is our king!” one man angrily corrected him, and then picked up a small cobblestone and hurled it high in the air toward the Frenchman. It was an erratic toss, missing Murat by several feet; but suddenly, as the soldiers raised their guns, women screamed, dozens of people fell to the ground in panic, and dozens more turned around and raced
from the square—even though Murat, whose quick upraised hand prevented any shooting, was now trying desperately to stop the people from running away.

“Brothers and sisters,” he called out to them, “I came in friendship. Please hear what I have come to tell you.”

But they continued to run, and were soon joined by others who had been lying on the ground. Maria, watching from her position behind a bush near the steps, saw the square become vacated, except for Murat and his soldiers, now huddled around him. Murat removed his hat and gestured with his hands. Then the soldiers moved in formation, leaving the square and heading uphill toward the road to Vibo Valentia.

Maria climbed unsteadily down the steps and walked along a narrow path until she reached her neighborhood—a row of stone houses filled with disquieted people who, through the partly opened shutters of their windows, could be heard speaking anxiously about the arrival of Murat. Ahead she saw her husband hastening toward her, hobbling with a cane because of his deformed leg, urging that they immediately seek shelter in their house; he had heard there might soon be bloodshed. Armed forces loyal to King Ferdinand were about to ambush Murat’s group along the hillside, he said, and the whole area might then be endangered by stray bullets and invading men in wild retreat or pursuit.