It was a loss that angered Umbertina as well as grieved her. Why should that bloom of a girl—well fed, well housed, and well taken care of—be snatched away? Had she suffered deprivation as Rocco, poveretto, had? Why? Why, with all their successes, did such a warning of humility come from God?

“There is no reason,” Domenico Saccà said when he came to make his call of condolence. Domenico had experienced his own sour run of luck and tried, philosophically, to come to terms with it as a person of some education would, not superstitiously as the ex-peasants did. “It is the imprevedibile, the unforeseen and unaccountable . . . what God in His mercy hides from us. It happens in all lives, no matter how fortunate.” Umbertina’s heart agreed, but it was still a defeat.

Serafino, aging, began to diminish: The great broad shoulders of il normanno, so distinctive among his shorter countrymen, became curved; his stature lessened, and he receded in spirit as well as physique. His once-full face was now pinched, his old benign look had changed to one of quizzical bewilderment. When he was taken to a studio photographer at the age of seventy-two, the resulting portrait fixed him with the dignity of a banker in his dark suit with a gold watch fob across his vest; yet a faint look of astonishment and displeasure was also registered on his face, as if in dissent from his garb and pose and the whole question of being there. He sat erect, his shoulders once again high, but his light eyes were questioning, wondering.

He had given his name to a business, and “S. Longobardi & Sons” could be seen painted on wagons that delivered produce all over town. S. Longobardi & Sons had expanded into wholesale produce—the logical extension of a retail grocery store. The Longobardi Wholesale was the first of its kind in the central Mohawk valley, and it soon became the purveyor to institutions, hotels, restaurants, and other food markets. To all appearances the shepherd from Calabria had led his family to their fertile pasture.

But circumstances also helped at the right time. Cato was growing, and to accommodate the stream of workers who poured in to work in the knitting mills, the city council decided to cut a new street parallel to Broad and open it to housing construction. That meant that the rear portion of the Longobardi property on Broad Street, through which the new Catherine Street was to be cut, greatly increased in value and was sold at good profit. The family was still left with the old mansion and the remaining land, which now had entrances on two streets.

Umbertina immediately sensed what to do. She had Samuele Muzzi start to build what she called a palazzo on the part of their land that fronted Catherine Street.