WHEN I first moved to Ireland, my surname presented certain problems, writes STEVE CORONELLA
From the start, Irish people jokingly called me Steve “Cornetto”, after the popular ice cream treat. Then there were the obvious jibes inspired by films such as The Godfather and Goodfellas. Even though they couldn’t pronounce it, everyone assumed from my last name that I knew the likes of Tony Soprano personally. At other times, people might ask if I was friendly with the family that runs our local chipper.
So you can see that during my early years in Ireland I had to grin and bear the sort of stupid stereotyping that the Irish themselves have endured for centuries.
Of course, anyone who’s genuinely curious about my second name gets a more agreeable reaction. After making sure there isn’t a stereotype in sight, I relate the following tale.
In the spring of 1986, after several weeks’ worth of trains, planes and the occasional automobile, I found myself sitting alone on an unfamiliar doorstep in Sicily. I also found myself questioning the wisdom of travelling 5,000 miles from my family home just outside Boston to revive my father’s neglected lineage.
In the six-unit apartment block behind me lived my father’s uncle Francesco. We had never met. In fact, I wondered if he knew I existed.
From wary neighbours, I learned that Uncle Francesco and his family would be returning home in about an hour, for their midday meal. One hour stretched uncomfortably into two.
My doubts grew. Why was I here? My adventure was part genealogical dig, part self-exploration. After my third visit to Ireland in the 1980s, I became our family’s informal historian, examining photo albums and home movies with a fresh eye, listening patiently and carefully to my grandmother’s surprisingly clear memories of her younger days in Cork. She had emigrated in 1930 and settled with my grandfather in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a stone’s throw from Harvard University.
Yet my father’s family remained a mystery. His parents continued to speak Italian throughout the four decades they lived in Boston’s West End district and then in the suburb of Medford, only occasionally admitting a colloquial phrase or a few words of English into their conversation. This proved to be an impassable barrier to any meaningful exchanges between us, and they died in the early 1970s, before my curiosity in them was awakened.
As a result, I knew little of their lives. I was in Augusta, Sicily, to collect any clues that might help me understand them better.
Uncle Francesco, his wife, Maria, and son, Cesare, finally arrived home. They got out of their car and approached the front door.
“Signor Rizza?” I asked.
“Sì.” “Mi chiamo Stephen Coronella. Nonna mia . . .”
My fund of Italian phrases was spent after two sentences. I resumed my explanation in rapid-delivery English. “My grandmother was your sister, which means that my father . . .” Cesare waved my verbal express to a halt while directing me upstairs to the family’s apartment. “Too much, too much,” he said with a shrug and a smile.
Once inside, Cesare disappeared for a moment and came back carrying an enormous blue book with a battered front cover. It was an Italian-English dictionary. The book had been collecting dust for almost 10 years, ever since Cesare completed his last university course in English.
We spent the afternoon pushing it at one another across the table in the TV room. Just as soon as we had cleared one linguistic hurdle, another popped up, and it was back to the book.
But Cesare could not always be around to act as interpreter, and it was during these absences that I grew closer to Uncle Francesco. My visit stirred something in him. Perhaps I was a living testament to his departed sister’s life in America, a life he had only glimpsed through occasional letters and infrequent photographs.
One afternoon we went visiting together – my sudden appearance had generated much curiosity – and afterward strolled the streets of Augusta, with Uncle Francesco acting as tour guide.
Using a sparse medley of English, French, and Italian phrases, I asked him to show me where my grandparents had lived before they sailed for Boston. We made an unlikely couple, the old retired gentleman dressed impeccably in coat and tie, careful to doff his hat to passing ladies, and the curious traveller in fading, weathered jeans and clunky hiking boots.
We found the building my grandparents had once called home, and we paused for a moment. But in the bustle of late afternoon, it was hard to imagine the same scene as it might have appeared some 60 years before to the Boston-bound newlyweds.
Farther along, we stopped in front of a sporting-goods store. By placing his hands together, then resting his head sideways upon them and bawling quietly like a baby, Uncle Francesco indicated that this was his birthplace, there in the back where today they restring tennis rackets. The memory, and his own ridiculous pantomime, made him laugh softly to himself.
Back at home, we looked over his stamp and coin collections, finding that we needed the big blue book less and less to communicate.
As a memento of my visit, Uncle Francesco gave me a rare 500-lire coin, along with a meticulous copy of our family tree, hand-drawn on white typewriter paper. In the lower right corner he wrote a simple message, a sort of gentle study guide, to my father, Phil: “Remember PHILIP, Uncle Francesco.” On the way to the train station the next day, Cesare explained that my visit was important to his father, and it was important, too, that we stay in touch.
It was raining over Sicily the night I returned to Rome, though I hardly noticed. Thanks to an old man’s soft-spoken joy, a light shone where none had shone before. As it turned out, lugging a 40-pound backpack all the way from Boston, then across Ireland, England, and France, before finally “coming home” in Sicily, had been well worth the effort.
And that’s why, as I continue to explain to my Irish friends, the name is Coronella.