Writing Historical Fiction: Churches and Cemeteries
PART FOUR IN THE HISTORICAL FICTION SERIES: VARSALONA
My time in Castronovo di Sicilia was not all ceremonies and birthday parties. After all, I was there to search for information on the bandit’s family.
On my first full day, I showed up again at the Comune and the Mayor introduced me to the new Vice-Mayor, a hometown girl named Marisa Gentile, who couldn’t have been more than 25 and only knew a few words of English. Poor Marisa was tasked with accompanying me to the cemetery to look for family headstones, and later, to take me to meet a family member who still lived in town.
Very sweet and patient, Marisa endured hours following a crazy foreigner through the local cemetery while the stranger took photos and videos of anything that could be remotely related to a bandit from a century ago.
We found several Varsalonas in the cemetery, and I even found a Varsalona mausoleum with a huge metal gate and candles and photos lining a small ledge inside, an impressive burial place that seemed fitting for the family of the town’s most well-known historical figure. There were several Vincenzo Varsalonas, the name of one of the bandit's sons, and Marisa reminded me that Sicilians tended to reuse first names over and over, and so for example, there may have been one or more Vincenzo Varsalonas in every generation. I took photos and videos and made a mental note to cross-reference dates later.
There was a special subject I kept in mind, two people who were missing from the family genealogy — Varsalona’s daughter Concetta’s husband and youngest child, Emma. Concetta and her husband decided to emigrate to America in the early 1900s, and they arrived at the port of Naples to board the ship with their five young children. The husband and child appeared to be ill, so the authorities would not allow them on the ship. (This sounds a lot like Covid-19 restrictions of today, and in fact, the Spanish flu — a type of malaria — was the pandemic of the time.)
Concetta and the other children went on to New York to wait for them to come later. Instead, they both died after only a few months. Because she never returned to Sicily, Concetta never knew the details surrounding their deaths.
For hours in the heat of the midday sun, Marisa and I searched every inch of the ancient, treeless cemetery, but found nothing. As we were leaving, we ran into the groundskeeper, and he led us into a cool little stone room where he pulled out a map of the cemetery and a historical record book of the people buried there. Let me be clear: these items were hand-written and drawn. Still, no luck.
When I explained to the groundskeeper why the two people had not made it to America, he let out a huge, “Ahhhhhh,” with his hands held together in prayer, rocking up and down toward me as he looked away with a “Why didn’t you tell me that” expression. He shared that when people died from the pandemic, they weren’t buried in the main part of the cemetery. Instead, their bodies were placed in an (unmarked) mass burial pit in a separate part of the property.
Still, the two had been born and raised in this small town, so there must be some record of their deaths. The groundkeeper suggested that I visit the town priest since the best record of births and deaths was in the church.
So we climbed back into my Smart car and trudged up the long hill to Castronovo until we reached the town center and parked next to the Chiesa Madre della Santissima Trinità. We were about to go inside when Marisa’s phone rang and while she listened intently to someone on the other end, she motioned for me to walk towards Piazza Pepi instead of inside the church.
When she hung up, she looked at me and said, “There is someone who wants to meet you. He knows all the history of Castronovo. His name is Zio Peppino.”
