At Soveria Mannelli, a market town whose balconies were laden with geraniums and begonias growing twenty to thirty blossoms a plant, they stopped at the main piazza and Ferruccio bought some of the gorgeous figs and grapes that were heaped on cloths on the ground. Some of the older women were wearing long red pleated skirts covered with an apron and topped by a velvet bodice.

“Here you are,” said Ferruccio, taking Tina’s arm and guiding her to a building that fronted the piazza. “Read this plaque just to make an honest tourist out of you so that you won’t be mistaken for a returning paesan.”

The building was called Albergo Garibaldi, and the plaque which Tina read said that in that dwelling, on August 30, 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Cavalier and Hero, had spent the night before setting out to defeat the Bourbon tyranny, to liberate the South from its yoke, and to reunite it to a new Italy.

“That’s great,” she said, “I never knew Garibaldi came so close to Castagna.” For they were now only twelve kilometers from the fork that would lead to the village.

At the crossroads, they turned from the main road to a small dirt one that followed the course of the Corace in the valley between hills thick with shadings of green. The air was fresh and leaves cut the heat of the sun. They crossed a bridge over the stream and passed several women beating sheets over rocks at the water’s edge. It was as it might have been in Umbertina’s day.

“What a scene!” Tina said. She called Ferruccio’s attention to a man on a motor-bike going up the road ahead of them. “Just look at that—plastic baskets hanging from each side of him instead of the beautiful hand-woven reed ones that country people make. How ridiculous that looks . . . these people! No sense of authentic beauty.”

“Don’t you believe in progress for ‘these people’? It may be pleasing for you to see the women wash in a stream or sit for hours to weave baskets from rushes, but would you do it? Plastic is not picturesque, but these people don’t even know what ‘picturesque’ means. It’s a tourist term.”

“Yes, I know,” retorted Tina quickly, hating to be caught up like that by Ferruccio. “Now tell me that this is a society in transition. I know how you sociologists talk. But I’m still glad to see something of how it used to be. And I still think it’s too bad they are losing some of their natural ways of doing things. Sometimes, when I see the Italo-Americans, I think it’s too bad they left at all.”