Memories

Rome with Carolyn, 8 may 2015

Over ten years ago. When living here in Rome was still something to be envied. The Janiculum.

Dinner at Lo Scarpone. A large entrance courtyard with a flowering vine covering the whole area. Then in with tables and let’s say real food, although they also had pizza. In one sector one could recognize actors from films we had seen. We were seated in the main side, after passing a counter with all kinds of antipastos. 

Wine was brought and as we looked around we felt we were at a filming of the Sopranos.

Table near us – long table – had 4 or 5 men and an equal number of women. Most of the men were middle-aged, rather beefy, bronzed, wearing white shirts open at the collar and one at least had a chain with a pendant. One of the women in particular struck me. Long black hair, dressed in black with a generous decolletè, showing her breasts, even though she was no longer really young. The other women were dressed in oranges and yellows, not as bejeweled as one would expect though. Fascinating. 

Then at a table next to us was an older woman and, I take it, her son or grandson. She looked just like Carolyn’s grandmother (or rather great grandmother) in the painting in her living room. An older woman, more bones than flesh, dressed in black and with the air of a raptor to her. Fierce.

We asked Carolyn about the painting. It is by a cousin of hers, and the woman in question was of course Sicilian, widowed at 35, with 7 children. Caltanisetta which was much more mafia than Palermo at the time. Thanks to her Mafia connections she sent two of the boys to Canada, (easier to get there than the US) and the others followed, eventually going to the state of New York. And then they sent for their mother too. Carolyn remembers when she was 10 or 12 and Sundays meant first church (the family was Catholic but Carolyn didn’t last long in that belief), then to her mother’s mother for the midday meal (and here they always got real Italian food), then to her father’s mother for dinner I guess, and in the end to her great grandmother’s, a formidable figure. Who of course spoke no English.

So with all this theatrical setting, Carolyn, James V. and I had carciofi alla judea, the tenderest lombatina and asparagus. This was at Lo Scarpone. Wish we could do that again.