I love these stones

These are the stones that pave the streets of the spot on Earth that in all my life I have loved the most. The town is Torremaggiore, province of Foggia, region of Puglia, in southern Italy.

I loved it with the intensity and naivetè of a ten year old, the age I was when we moved from California to Italy. My first conscious memories of Torremaggiore are from those days. I had been there before, when I was about five, but that memory lives only through my photos of that time.

I am the one on all fours, probably inspecting the stones I am writing about today.

When I was ten we made the big move, and my brother, our mother and I stayed in Torremaggiore, where my grandmother and my mother’s sister and husband lived with their two daughters, while my father looked for an apartment and a job in Naples.

My cousins and I played and fought with abandon, I basked in my sweet grandmother’s attention, ate mozzarella and Nutella like a little hedonist, and best of all wandered the streets of the town on my own. I couldn’t have been safer. Everywhere I went someone who knew my mother would call her to let her know that I was petting all the horses tethered to the farmers carts and all the stray dogs. It was perfection.

I slept in my cousins’ room, the high ceilinged spacious room we called “la stanza rosa” (the pink room) because the bedspreads, the sheer curtains and the dressers were all pale pink. In the afternoons the tall green shutters that opened onto the balcony overlooking the street were closed and we napped. I will always remember the sound that woke me every afternoon: the clip-clop of horses hooves on the cobblestones of the street below, as the farmers’ carts went back to work.

Eventually we settled in Naples, but went to Torremaggiore as often as we could, and people there loved to ask me if I missed the United States, or if I was excited to be living in Naples, just so they could hear the little American girl say: “No! I want to live in Torremaggiore!”

We went to Torremaggiore in October, to visit the last few relatives who still live there, and to take my parents’ ashes to the cemetery, and we walked down the street I walked down so many times as a child, when I would step out the door of my grandmother’s home and turn left towards the church at the end of the block. Not much has changed on the street, except for more cars and no horse-drawn carts.

My grandmother’s home is where the people are standing on the left. My mother, her brother and sister sold it in the seventies to people who unfortunately never did any work on it nor moved into it, so it was looking very rundown.

But did I care? No. I was just happy it was still there. It was as if I could look right through that door, and see myself at ten, not a care in the world, safe and light-hearted, running through the big rooms with angels painted on the ceilings and up and down the stairs, wanting nothing more from life than to stay in Torremaggiore forever.