Rediscovering family history in a small Italian coastal town

By Lizy Yagoda

This picture doesn't begin to do the Grotto justice. (photo by Meghan Groob)

My mother had warned me against making the trip from Rome. She told me that the town would be empty, it would be cold, and it would be a waste of time. She reminded me that there wasn’t even a train station in the town. I ignored her. I told my friends Meghan and Caitlin that we would be spending a day of our spring break in the Italian town of Gaeta.

Gaeta, a Western coastal town of 22,000, isn’t mentioned in any guidebook I know. I’ve never met another American who has heard of it. When I suggested a visit, my friends’ faces looked as if I had suggested a day-trip to Newark, NJ. I tried to sell them on the town, but it was obvious they viewed this trip as a favor to me.

Gaeta has been a part of my family’s history for more generations than my mother’s mother has the patience to recount. After all, she met her husband, the Gaeta native, after he had moved to the United States.

All I know is that my mother’s father was born there in 1920. Born with a degenerative eye disease, he lost his vision as he grew up. With threat of war in Europe imminent, he moved to the U.S. in 1939. Years later, he would tell my mother the stories of his hometown.

My mother shared those stories with my sister and me. My favorite was how he would tan on the beach wearing a leopard-print bikini bottom bathing suit, à la Tarzan. The first time I visited Gaeta, I was in middle school. I met my Great-uncle Tonino. My mother, father, sister, and I found the Simeone family summer house and knocked at the gate. Tonino set his two menacing dogs to the gate to scare us away. He had assumed we were a gaggle of lost, unrelated-to-him Americans.

My friends and I were hoping for a less menacing reception when our train arrived in Formia. We were greeted by a blue sky and a warm sun. There was also a biting breeze, but we tried to ignore it and focus on the positive. Our cab let us off by the beach and the blue of the Mediterranean filled the horizon.

I remembered the beach as filled with huge, festively patterned umbrellas, designating the turfs of beach clubs. I had never thought about the beach devoid of those umbrellas, but there it was. A long expanse of bare sand. The only interruption was a lone shack and the ruins of a dinghy. We lay on the beach and tried to ignore the wind whipping off the sea and sprinkling sand over our bodies. We tried to maneuver ourselves so that we would lie under the path of the wind, so that low dunes would block the wind, but we had no such luck. And, like my mother had said, there wasn’t another human in sight.

In my sales pitch on Gaeta, I had gone on at length about a hut I remembered from my previous trips with my family. In was nestled in the side of the cliff bordering the beach and an old man worked there. Inside, there was a tub of buffalo mozzarella, a plate of prosciutto, and a basket of long Italian rolls. There was also a family of cats that wandered among the ingredients of the most perfect sandwich I’ve ever eaten. The man wore a gray—I assume originally white—wife-beater that only began to cover his expansive chest hair. He did not wash his hands and we didn’t care. My sister and I had those sandwiches for lunch every day.

Upon reaching the beach, we saw that the hut was no longer in existence. Maybe some Italian health inspector shut it down, to the great dismay of our stomachs. We ended up eating lunch at a deserted cafe near the house where my grandfather was born—less than a mile from the summer house where my family just barely escaped being attacked by Tonino’s dogs.

Afterwards, we got cups of gelato from a gas station and walked back to the beach. I entertained the thought of finding Toninio’s house, but it was too far lost in the labyrinth of time and crumbly buildings.

After laying on the beach for a few minutes, we decided to make our way up the mountain to the Grotto of the Turk, a split in the cliffs off the beach, a former hide-away for pirate ships. I hadn’t been in Gaeta for five years, but I led the way. We started up the steep hill and I began to get nervous. I imagined that they were only humoring me, that they would rather have spent the day in the Forum or in Pompeii, not some dinky little town that Lizy barely remembers. The incline softened and our pace slowed as we all looked out over the view.

The beach was white and the ocean was blue, an arresting contrast. Sitting on the beach, I had thought the lack of umbrellas to be a disappointment. From above, I saw that the umbrellas gilded the lily. In the other direction we could see a mountain fading into the sky above the city. We tore ourselves away and continued our walk. We passed a snack bar that I remembered once selling commemorative plates of Benito Mussolini. This time around, the plates were still available, though hidden in the back of the shop.

We reached the top of the hill and paid our one euro each to begin the climb down to the Grotto. The steps followed the most inefficient path down to the grotto, but soon we saw the ocean peeking out between the dark slabs of cliff. The three of us instantly whipped out our cameras, even though we knew that no photo could capture the scene. The sea was too bright and the cave was too dark. The contrast that gave the Grotto its beauty prevented it from ever being captured on film. This was one of those times where I wished for my own personal painter.

We spent about an hour taking pictures in the Grotto before the sun started to set. We climbed back up the winding stairs and waited for the cab to take us back to the Formia train station. On the train back to Rome, my friends chattered about the beauty of Gaeta and how nice it was to be in an undiscovered town without any other Americans. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that there was a NATO base on the other side of town full to the brim with Americans. On Facebook a few days later, Meghan described a picture of the three of us in Gaeta as “a group photo at the gate to heaven.”

At the hostel that night in Rome, I sent my mom a quick email letting her know that the trip went okay. I told her that her warnings were unfounded and I promised to send her pictures once I could upload them. The next morning, I opened another email from her. The fact that I had gone to her father’s hometown and remembered all the stories and tales brought her to tears.

Over the next few days of our trip, I kept thinking about how the town I remembered had changed. It wasn’t surprising, logically. I can think of dozens of ways my hometown has changed over the last five years. But Gaeta was so solid in my memory that it was shocking to see the gaps between remembrance and reality. I also kept thinking about how I had led my friends around this town I remembered, sharing second-hand anecdotes. Maybe it’s another part of growing up, replacing childhood memories with newly made ones, changing from a listener to a teller.

Lizy Yagoda is a third-year student at Vassar College studying history and religion. She is from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.