Searching the Amalfi Coast for Long-lost Family Ties
NEW HAVEN'S 'AMALFITANIS' Keep TIES TO Italia
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April 25, 1982
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''This was 1 of my Dad's favorite pictures,'' Agnes Laudano said. She was belongings a large, framed photograph of a monk sitting beneath the arbor of a hotel. ''Dad died at 96 and had this every bit a memento. He was born there.''
''There'' is Amalfi, Italy, the ancestral home of Mrs. Laudano and of 10,000 other New Haven residents besides. Their forebears came here to fish, to brand hardware, to raise children, to build homes.
More than people of Amalfi stock -Amalfitanis, they call themselves -at present live in New Haven than in Amalfi itself, which has half-dozen,400 residents. The cities are officially sister cities, and as well the twin pinions of a deeper tie.
A family story has information technology, Mrs. Laudano said, that the monk in the photo resembled her granddaddy. Her aunt was a waitress at the hotel, the Cappucini. When her husband died, the story goes, the monks took care of her. Showroom at Yale on Amalfi
''They say the hotel is cute,'' offered Mrs. Laudano's sis, Sophie Ferraro, in a whisper of awe. The sisters lent their photograph to the City of New Haven for an showroom almost Amalfi. The exhibit is the city's contribution to the International Off-white today at Yale University.
New Haven'south Amalfitanis still transport money to restore the Cathedral of St. Andrew the Apostle, which they call ''Il Duomo.'' They celebrate the Feast of Saint Andrew, their patron saint. Busts of him, brought from Italy decades ago, stand in both St. Michael's Church and the Lodge of St. Andrew Hall.
And when Mayor Biagio DeLieto, himself an Amalfitani, asked for contributions to the Amalfi exhibit, dozens of people reached into their attics or atop their mantlepieces for the pieces of a shared past.
''Fabrics of people'south lives,'' is the description Cynthia DiTallo favors. Miss DiTallo, a public-data officer for the city, was in accuse of collecting it all: the recipes, the renowned Amalfi pottery, the mosaic rendering of Il Duomo, the snapshots, coins, magazines, paintings, even the slice of rock ane homo bought in Amalfi during Earth War II, assured that it has hardened lava from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. 'You Tin't Describe It'
''The feeling for Amalfi has simply been carried down,'' said Theresa Argento, the president of the ladies' auxiliary of the St. Andrew Society. ''We were brought up with that love for the lilliputian town. When I went there in 1976, I had a feeling I knew where the church was, where the cute buildings were, just from hearing the stories.''
Something contemplative - nearly worshipful - often tinges the memories of the Amalfitanis. ''They say the water is so clear,'' said Mrs. Laudano. ''People alive longer there,'' said Salvatore Cinque, the possessor of a trucking company, whose father emigrated from Amalfi. ''It's out of this world,'' said Peter Esposito, who teaches Italian in an adult-education program in Hamden. ''You tin can't draw it.''
Mr. Esposito instead turned to Longfellow, who called Amalfi a ''long-lost paradise.'' He gave Miss DiTallo the poem that carries the celebration.
He too offered her a history of Amalfi, written in Latin and given to him by a monsignor. The book recounts the events that gave Amalfi its indelible sense of identity: iii centuries as an independent commonwealth with Venice and Pisa; the seat of a maritime code for the entire Mediterranean; the treasury of the sarcophagus of St. Andrew, which was delivered from Constantinople by the warriors of the 4th Crusade.
Shortly, Mr. Esposito was telling stories of battles between Amalfi and Salerno; each of his arms portrayed an army, and the war raged in the air in forepart of his shirt. Information technology was all, for a moment, so existent to him. ''Because it'south important,'' he said. ''That's my country, my onetime land.''
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/25/nyregion/new-haven-s-amalfitanis-keep-ties-to-italy.html
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