Carovilli 3

Tony, really sprightly for his age, let us guess his birth date...

Tony, really sprightly for his age, let us guess his birth date: unbelievable! He was born in 1934, exactly on the same day and the same year as my mother, he is confused, he carries us away, he wants to show us everything.. he starts off to go to his home.. then I warn them that if by chance they closed the church (it is already five past seven p.m.), we had better first go and see this one… Being in the hurry of seeing the village, Brian has forgotten in his car the precious folder and we go together to his car to take it..  We check the church name on Salvatore’s birth certificate: it’s exactly Santa Maria Assunta, the church he was christened at! Tony informs us that the baptistery used to be next to the church entrance, now it has been moved beside the altar.. The priest who a few years ago signed the extract from the Birth Certificate Register is the same priest who married Tony and his wife and re-married them on their 50th wedding anniversary (what an odd coincidence!). Nothing can be done to avoid it, in that now Brian cannot but burst into tears.. the emotion is very strong and there is a flood of tears.. he can no longer contain himself…
We go out of the church: on a wall Brian remarks a death notice of a woman who had passed away a few days earlier, bearing – oddly enough !! - the same name and surname as great grandfather Salvatore’s mother.
Then Tony takes us to his home… he shows us every room, he describes any detail of all the people appearing on the pictures he has at home, so proud of telling us bits of his life, shared between Carovilli and Ohio.. Brian adds that this is the first time he has entered a private home in Italy (among other things, this is Tony’s great grandfather’s house), we come across a few other unbelievable coincidences and Brian is moved again (a hardened linguist like me is fully aware of what a huge treasure it is to enter a family and feeling as if you belonged to it, observing all their habits and costums from the inside, it is the privilege of attending a show and being able to notice all the very rich details of those who can see it from behind the scenes, with explanations on the past experiences of all the actors,… a completely different thing than staying at an anonymous hotel..) CONTINUED...