The soil and the festivities

Time has passed with name-day dilemmas and terrestrial affairs and so have the generations, with the baton of the care for the fields and the vines passing from hand to hand.

Egidio passed it to Francesco known as Ciccillo (you have to accept it – it’s the second baptism of the community that decides), who passed it to his son Egidio who, naturally, called his first-born son with his father’s name. “He took me into the countryside with him, he got me to taste a different fruit each time, a new one with each season. Like the quince, different from all the others, although I probably wouldn’t have found it in the supermarket,” says Francesco Calitro Jr, who spent his summers and afternoons free of homework and books with grandparents, soil and local festivities. These were the business of Nicola, his maternal grandfather, devotee of St Joseph, patron saint of San Marzano. He turned the whole village upside-down to pull patterns of illuminations up to the sky and fireworks which enchanted this and the other world.