Between 1990 and 2000, I taught for the University of Maryland’s European Division at the U.S. Naval Base in Agnano, outside of Naples. Some of my students were the walking wounded of civilian life. “The drill sergeants didn’t beat me like my dad always did. What’s not to like about three meals a day and a bed with sheets?” In one class of 20, five had lost close relatives to violence. “I’d be on drugs, in jail or dead if it wasn’t for the military,” they said. Or: “The only jobs in town were flipping burgers.” Some had started college but “messed up,” generating The Call from home which cut off funding and suggested a chat with the local recruiter. “Yeah, the military really straightened me out.”

Quite a few of my students took full advantage of a foreign post, studying Italian and seeing what they could on weekends. But many were no more drawn to high culture than they had been back home. Rome was “full of old shit and busted buildings.” Some went further: Italy itself was an armpit, scummy, butt-ugly. In their defense, many shuttled between a drab, cheerless base and off-base housing in crumbling peripheral military ghettos, surrounded by elements who lived off American presence, often in unsavory ways. This wasn’t an Under the Tuscan Sun crowd.

I tried to keep Italy-bashing to a minimum in class time but once the dam just burst. Platitudes ran wild. “All this la famiglia business, and Italians don’t even love their kids,” a private swore. “If they did, they’d use seatbelts.” I was about to pull rank and end class discussion when an officer in the back announced that he had something to say. The dim eased. “One thing you gotta give Italians,” he began. I held my breath. “They can lay cement like nobody’s business.”

When we lived outside Naples, our local hospital was called La Schiana for the small mound on which it perched rather than its grand official designation: Ospedale Santa Maria delle Grazie di Pozzuoli. The city of Pozzuoli was old before the Romans, a major Alexandrian port. The first cement came from there, the apostle Paul tarried there a week (Acts 28:13). Somewhat later, Sofia Loren was born there.

La Schiana wasn’t over-obsessed with hygiene. Treatment could be rough and ready (see a coming blog). Layout was odd, with the orthopedic clinic down a steep, narrow stairway, but we never waited more than five minutes for attention, always got good care and paid nearly nothing. So why complain?

Signage was poor, though. One hot summer day I was wandering about un-air-conditioned La Schiana, following vague, contradictory directions to the office I needed. When I seemed to be on the right floor, I figured I’d just walk around and surely stumble on my office. Light flooded the end of a long hallway. Bleary with heat, I moved toward it and entered a large, brightly lit room.

And there I was in La Schiana’s unrefrigerated morgue. Four mostly sheeted bodies lay on aluminum tables. Large men, it seemed, very still. A crucifix tacked to the wall. Nobody living there but me. An empty table stood waiting. For me? I backed out with precipitous speed, somehow found the right office and quite shaken, hurried home to find my neighbor Rosa.

“The corpses were just there where anybody could take them,” I blabbered. “There in the heat.” Rosa wore her now-familiar, “Pamela, you’re being a simpleton/American,” expression. “These weren’t people like us, she explained patiently. “They were poor nobodies. A good family doesn’t let loved ones die in a hospital.” I pointed out several cases in which this blunder might happen. Heart attack, stroke, accident . . . . Rosa shook her head.

“People from good families die at home. If they’re about to die, they’re sent home that day. If they do happen to die in the hospital, the nurse puts in an IV.” But the person’s dead, I interrupted. Rosa went on calmly, “puts in an IV and the body goes home in an ambulance. The death notice reads ‘died at home’ so the family keeps its reputation.”

I hasten to add that death practices are different beyond the outskirts of Naples, but this experience put a little lightness in La Schiana. Whatever happened, nobody in my family would die there.

It happens at books groups that someone asks if Opi is real. Oh yes. And it has been real for a long time, as the site Opionline can tell you in English and Italian. Altitude 1250 ft, current population 500, it sits on a plateau between the Sangro, Fondillo and Fredda valleys. People have been living in, on, and near Opi since Paleolithic times (as Carlo points out in Chapter 1), and the name may come from a pagan goddess of abundance (wishful thinking) venerated by the ancient Maris and Samnite peoples.

Or not. “Opi” could be Roman, from the Ope, wife and also sister of Saturn (we won’t go further on this point). Or from a priestess of a temple of Vesta for which Opi was considered a sacred village. Or maybe not. Maybe from the Latin “oppdium” or fortified castle. Anyway, Opi got itself a name. And then the trouble began.

In medieval times, command of the valleys and towns was hotly contested by local lords, various invasions from the north, brigands, feudal powers and constant quarrels with neighboring, somewhat larger Pescasseroli. Shortly after the time of my story, mid 1880’s, the exodus to America began, with 500+ people leaving over the next 15 years. On July 31, 1901, a horrible earthquake struck the town. Emigration from the hill towns throughout the 20th C continued the population drain, although tourism, particularly eco-tourism and cross-country sking is bringing back some young people.

The last time we were there the town was in a fury of excitement to welcome home one of their own who had just won the Italian cross-country ski championship, seizing it from the northern Italian, heavily sponsored skiers who suffered a major blow to their sense of entitlement. Hah!

Near Ancona is the hill town of Loreto, an international pilgrim Mecca since it hosts the House of Maria. That Maria, the mother of Jesus. You may wonder what it’s doing in Central Italy and also why it’s so Baroque, with dark black stone walls, a lot of gilt, elaborately carved stools and lamps hanging from ornate wrought iron fixtures. There are several theories.

The one I heard first is that angels hoisted the house from its foundations in Jerusalem and took it for a few centuries to Croatia. There are lovely beaches there, which may have been the attraction for Angelic Transport, Inc. In any case, in due time, the angels up and flew the house across the Adriatic. Where to put it now? The thing must have been heavy, even for angels. By Loreto’s good luck, an arrow-shaped rock formation off the coast clearly pointed to Loreto, a poor hill town at the time, lacking unique resources or pilgrim attractions. The angels set down the House in the main piazza, minus one wall which had fallen away during transport. These things happen. Then the angels went off or up or wherever they go. The grateful town built an ornate church around the House and suddenly Loreto was on the map. As you can imagine, the House of Mary was a far, far better draw than the umpteenth nail from the Cross.

The second theory is that a returning Crusader, devout, credulous, or merely mercenary, by the name of Angeli (that is, “Angels”) acquired the House for ready cash. Lacking literal angelic transport, he had it disassembled, packed with instructions (IKEA-like) and transported by ship. I read somewhere that its first stop was Naples but then came north as part of a noblewoman’s dowry in the 16^th Century. This timing is strangely congruent with the architectural aspect, but let’s not be cynical.

There are other theories but we move on.

A couple years ago I was taking friends to Loreto and my father in law, then rapidly declining, announced that holy water could cure him. Cesare had never been practicing, devout or particularly superstitious, but it was a modest request from a very sick man and I promised to get some. Outside the veritable House of Mary, I figured, holy water must be as easy to buy as postcards. Not quite.

My friends, Daniel and Jeannine, are practicing Catholic, but not of the Holy Water kind, and a childhood of white-bread Protestantism left me quite unprepared. The process was  so self-evident to my informants and so non-intuitive to me that in the end Daniel and Jeannine, just sat down on the sunny steps to the church and watched, bemused, as I went to and fro on my mission.

First, you find the “library,” which is actually a store for religious objects, not in the church but in a poorly marked in a side building. I asked for holy water and was told, severely, that it could not be bought. The library only sold containers for same, in various sizes. I got the smallest vial, which was carefully wrapped. I asked where one “got” (not “bought”) the water. Anywhere, the clerk said impatiently, as if I were quite dense. From a water bottle. Did they sell bottled water?  No. “Go to the fountain,” said the equally impatient woman behind me. “Get the water and get it blessed.”

So I took my package to the marble fountain in the piazza, unwrapped the little vial and tried to fill it, which was tricky, since the opening was small and the fountain gushing. Back to the church, threading through pilgrims, many in wheel chairs, I asked around and finally directed to line snaked in front of a weary, bearded friar-looking fellow in a brown robe seated at a high desk.

The drill, I gathered, is that you put a coin in a brass slot marked “offerte” (offerings), conveniently located between friar and supplicant and he did the blessing. I asked how much one put in the slot and was told in whispers that one euro (about $1.40 then) was “enough.”

The line moved slowly, then stalled when the couple head of me reached the friar. Only then did I notice their shopping bag. Out came pictures of (I supposed) various family members, a couple cars, a cat, a beach house, a pregnant woman. There were keys put on the desk, a couple rosaries, some envelopes, various vials of water. A water bottle. All for a euro, quite a bargain, but I wondered in panic if every item needed separate blessing. Apparently not. The friar blessed the objects in batches and in 15 minutes the blessings were done and the now holy mess shoved back into the shopping bag.

I had been pondering what to say about Cesare’s condition, but there was no need. When my time came, the friar stared fixedly at the “offerte” slot; I put in my euro; he muttered something over my vial; made a weary cross and that was that. Threading out to the blinding sunlight where Daniel and Jeannine were patiently waiting, I felt closer to Martin Luther than ever in my life.

I wish I could say the water helped. My mother in law dumped the vial into a glass of tap water and gave it to Cesare, who I think had already forgotten his request. His condition did not improve. But I had been a good daughter in law and that’s its own small blessing.