They sped down the valley of the Busento, and in the dusty little villages where they stopped for gas Tina could always make out the americani—the immigrants who had made money in America and come back to spend out their old age in those anonymous places of their birth. She saw them in their short-sleeved plaid or patterned drip-dry shirts, and they looked forlorn, beached, miserable even if they had spent all their adult lives in America cursing the new land and waiting to have enough money to get back to the old. For it was always too late to go back, and they didn’t fit in anywhere. Tina, who had always wondered why Umbertina had so completely relinquished her Italian ties, now saw the wisdom of that release. She had made a choice.

“Look at this country,” she said testily, lashing out at Ferruccio because he, Italian, was accountable, “dry as a bone, bare, parched. Why doesn’t someone preach trees to these people?” And she thought of the poplars of her father’s Veneto, the cypresses and oaks of Tuscany, the sweet green hills of the Marche. “I’m sick of this official guidebook spiel about the austere beauty of Calabria, and the people living from wild asparagus and wild artichokes. There’s nothing growing around here. Why don’t they come right out and say, ‘This is a plundered land’!”

“Mia cara, you haven’t realized yet that Italians, especially official ones, do not have the addiction to truth that you Americans do!”

They passed sheep and goats being herded along the road, barefoot women in black with jugs or bundles of brush upon their heads, and donkeys tethered in village piazzas by the dozens. Even a few little Fiats with Turin license plates could be seen as they got nearer to Cosenza. “The immigrants to the North are back for vacation,” Ferrucio said every time they passed one.

Then after Cosenza they began the ascent into the highlands, and to Tina’s enormous relief trees began to appear, the first strands of oak and beech and pine.

“This is the Sila,” Ferruccio explained—“called the Switzerland of Italy, as if Swissness will remove any southern stigma and bring visitors. It’s said that this was where Jove spent his summers . . . and now we’re here, Jove in the guise of a Maserati bearing Europa away!” He laughed and looked over at her. “Or should I say ‘America’?”

Tina began to dread the arrival at Castagna with Ferruccio and his sophisticated, detached ways. She began to feel protective about this unknown place, which in its own way would certainly be as miserable as all the other villages they had passed through, or why else would its people have started leaving a hundred years ago.