journal

after a year

October 8, 2024 2024, diario/journal

It’s been a year since I last added to the journal. The reason for coming back is that we’ve moved and I want to start featuring both the amazing views from up here on Mount Washington and to also write about the experience of moving from our house of 40 years; a 200-year old house, in the Mexican War Streets, we renovated from top to bottom.

The thumbnail, on the home page, is of the sculpture, by James A. West, of Seneca Leader Guyasuta and George Washington. The sculpture is set at the western end of Grandview Avenue – a favorite with tourists because it shows the Point and the three rivers – Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio. The above image is of the Point on Sunday, September 22 – the Steelers’ home-opener. I took the picture from our large-room.

mornigs1

October 9, 2024 2024, diario/journal

Mornings are fascinating; you see skies full of clouds, silhouettes breaking in the morning light and an orange disk burning the horizon; visuals that you never see from the ground.

The four windows – each 6feet by 5.5feet – of the big-room look out onto this amazing landscape and in the early morning that vista is ever-changing and totally surreal.

The thumbnail shows clouds nestled in the valley that stretches through the Southside, behind the modern downtown and out 279North. Knew 279N lay in a valley, but never knew that the valley runs through the South Hills – in the Pittsburgh narrative, the Northside, Downtown and the South Hills are not connected.

mornings2

October 10, 2024 2024, diario/journal

At the west corner of the unit, there is a smaller window, perpendicular to the rest, that looks down the Ohio River; I have breakfast there. The thumbnail on the home page is of the corner with its structural square column covered in mirrors. The image shows 3 facets – on the left is PA-65; in the middle, the mirror reflect the top of the West End Bridge; on the right, image captures the room-long window-seat.

The above image is of the three bridges that cross the Ohio immediately after its headwaters at the Point. The first, and the one you see mostly the superstructure of, is the West End Bridge; the next one down is a railroad bridge; and the third is the McKeesport Bridge – a truss bridge modeled after the Hell Gate Bridge in NYC.

The industrial park bordered by the Ohio and PA-65 is a vibrant light-manufacturing sector.

the uninvited

October 14, 2024 2024, diario/journal

 

Where the windows on the front of the unit frame downtown Pittsburgh, the back of the building looks out on the South Hills of Western Pennsylvania. And we’re beginning to see the first hints of autumn color. Over the weekend, I drove up to Toronto for Canadian Thanksgiving and both upstate New York and Southern Ontario were showing reds and yellows.

Mary decided that Canadian Thanksgiving need not be about turkey and instead served a delicious porchetta – a savory, fatty, boneless pork roast. And true to Zinga, Muto, McCaig, Melchiorre tradition, of welcoming all who come to visit, Mary’s neighbors showed up unannounced/uninvited and joined us for dinner.

Naturally, that became an occasion for us to list all the various times people showed up unannounced and just sat down and ate with us. Rose and I think the first-time was in the early 80s when my parents’ neighbors showed up on Christmas Day at noon – the table was set and we were getting ready to sit down and eat – and my parents’ neighbors rang the doorbell. My father welcomed them and invited them to sit down and eat with us. For that first-time, we the snobs – my sister Jo’, Rose, Derrick, Mary and I – went upstairs and refused to eat with the uninvited. But that quickly changed and with each new iteration we began welcoming the unannounced, the uninvited. A response, a behavior my immigrant parents taught us; a response, a behavior that has given us wonderful memories, wonderful stories to tell again and again. (This iteration will include how Mary and Rose went without risotto, because there wasn’t enough for the expanded group.)

 

partial reunion – 6 of the 8 – of our 2023 barge trip
(missing are Rick and Sarah)

virtual1

October 27, 2024 2024, diario/journal




My life-experiences are situated in Calabria, Northern Ontario, Southern Rhode Island, New York City and Pittsburgh’s Northside. In all these places, being outdoors and getting outside were normal, everyday routines.


Our 300-year old house in the Mexican War Streets has a backyard that I made into a seasonal garden full of color, full of plants, full of silence. I spent hours potting violas, dead-heading geraniums, pruning wisteria, watering hosta.


We now live on Mount Washington and my experience of the outdoors is through windows in the front and back of our unit; and it’s through this transparent skin that I now experience the outdoors.



Mornings, I watch as fog floats above the rivers, as the sun burns the horizon, as the sky bleeds blue. Late afternoons, I have to block that same sun, because it now chars the empty sky. But by early evening, it’s become feeble and slowly falls into the west.

The featured image of the evening sky is from my home-office window; the above image is the tower of PPG Place.

virtual2

November 9, 2024 2024, diario/journal

Dove e quando si nasce sono determinanti per definire la personalità e influenzare il carattere di ciascuno di noi. Non debbono essere considerati comunque come elementi che irreversibilmente segnano il nostro cammino.
Non conosco l’ora in cui nacqui-mio padre compilava e conservò per anni il libro di famiglia ma non so che fine abbia fatto-: secondo alcune teorie anche questa è importante.
Il luogo è ancora lì, ancora abitato, e l’ho visitato alcuni anni fa. (Massimo Veltri)

Where and when we are born are crucial to defining our personality and influencing our character. However, they should not be considered as elements that irreversibly mark our path.
I don’t know the time I was born and according to some theories, the time we are born is also important in influencing character.
My father compiled and kept the family book for years but I don’t know what happened to it; so I have no information about the time of day I was born.
What I can tell you is that the place where I was born is still there, still inhabited, and I visited it a few years ago.

The featured image or thumbnail is the morning sky through my large windows. The above image is of me in Aprigliano, in 2006 looking down on the stairs of the home I grew up in. As kids Franco, Corrado and I spent hours on those steps playing briscola.

A distant cousin purchased our house along with the house of Za Peppina – our neighbor and cousin – which abutted ours; the distant cousin had moved back to Aprigliano after her husband retired from the Police force in Genoa. The new owners broke through and made a large modern home out of the two old houses.

56 years ago

November 28, 2024 2024, diario/journal

my first
American
Thanksgiving

Fifty-six years ago, I was at the Christian Brothers Novitiate in Narragansett, Rhode Island. That year, for the first time ever, the Novices were allowed to go home for Thanksgiving. Those of us whose families were too far away went home with friends who were local. John, whose family lived in Warwick, a half-hour north, invited me for the holiday.

I was a nineteen year-old, immigrant whose family had moved from Aprigliano, Cosenza to Northern Ontario and I now found himself in Rhode Island in late November. (There is no Thanksgiving in Italy and Canadian Thanksgiving, at that time, was an October-Monday-day-off. So, I had no reference for the significance of the holiday in American culture.)

And some 50 years later, my mind still scrolls through the memories and pictures of that first Thanksgiving:
– the den where John’s dad held court (Carl Spitzweg’s painting Bookworm hung between two colonial windows.)
– the dining room table, chairs and side-board of blond wood
– his mom’s apron trimmed with flowers
– the peas – the only food item I recognized
– the touch football game Friday morning and his brother Joe running to catch a pass
– John and I, late at night, in his old bedroom, laughing hysterically and worried his parents would hear us
– us visiting his aunt and uncle in their Providence home and the beautiful painting of roses above the sofa.

Thanksgiving has remained my favorite holiday, mainly because it’s free of family obligations and traditions and I don’t have to travel.

The featured image is of a neighborhood behind our condo – its mood is Pittsburgh-in-November. The above image came up when I searched Thanksgiving 1960s. It was the only result that included peas.

 

micro-climate

December 5, 2024 2024, diario/journal

the flats
from
Mount Washington

Last night here on Mount Washington, there were winds, snow, rain and thunder. Looking out the back windows I could see sheets of wet snow being whipped around lamp-post, being snapped through naked trees. This morning, everything was covered. (The featured image is of the South Hills and the West Hills under a blanked of white powder.) However, when I drove down the mountain to the flats there was no snow and no evidence of wind-damage. It was as if I was traveling between realities.

When I was visiting friends in San Francisco, the term micro-climate was ubiquitous in everyday conversation. Here in Pittsburgh there is less talk about micro-climates; we all know weather in the hollers is different; we all know the East-end gets different weather patters – they can afford it. I believe, we avoid the term because it seems pretentious; it’s the weather not a geopolitical talking-point. But, after living on Mount Washington for 3 months and given last night’s winter storm and the fact that the flats were spared, I’m convince I live in a micro-climate and I’ve been repeating it all day.

There seems to be one other variable that impacts living here in wild weather and that is the position of the building. All 5 towers faces the Point and every unit has a view of the confluence of the Monongahela, the Allegheny and the Ohio Rivers. But, no wind hits the front of the building, instead the winds batter and beat the back walls, the back windows. Last night, the noise could easily have accompanied the zombie apocalypse.

buon natale

December 25, 2024 2024, diario/journal

u quattro Barbara
u sie Nicola
u uettu Maria
u tririci Lucia
u vinticinque
u Vermessia 1

The plant we know as the Poinsettia is native to Mexico and Central America. The Aztecs called this familiar staple of the Christmas season “cuetlaxóchitl”—roughly translating to “flower that grows in residues (or excrement)”as it is dispersed through the droppings of the birds who eat their seeds.

Description
The scarlet petals —sometimes pink, white or coral colored—are actually bracts, modified leaves that surround the small yellow flowers on the end of the plant’s tall stems. These brightly colored bracts help attract pollinators to the small flowers but also ensure that the plant blooms because cuetlaxochitl needs extended periods of darkness in order to do so…which brings me to its Christmas association.

Winter Solstice
Responding to the lengthening nights after the autumn equinox, in its native world, wild cuetlaxochitl comes into bloom by the month of December. For the Aztec, the height of bloom around the winter solstice—the darkest time—signaled the start of a new cycle of life. Furthermore, the plant’s flowering happened to coincide with the date of the birth of Huitzilopochtli, the Sun God of the Aztec people.

This timing, however, took on a different significance for the Catholic missionaries who arrived in Mexico during the 17th century. For them, the annual bloom coincided with Christmas—with the pattern on its leaf representing the Star of Bethlehem and the scarlet red color associated with the blood of their Christ.

Extra: The name “Poinsetta” is derived from a 19th century botanist named Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first US Minister to Mexico who began exporting and cultivating the plants into America.

 

The above picture and text came from a Facebook posting from The Wyrd Sister.

The Calabrian poem, next to the picture of the poinsettia, is one I learned from my grandmother and it has stayed with me. The poem lists the major Saint Days leading up to Christmas.
December 4 is the feast of St. Barbara
December 6 is the feast of St. Nicholas of Bari
December 8 is the feast of The Immaculate Conception (Mary)
December 13 is the feast of St. Lucy
December 25 is the feast of the Real Messiah