Cosenza, a provincial capital in the heart of Calabria, looked already foreign to Umbertina’s eyes. But it was after they made their way through the plains and toward the mountain range in the distance which separated them from Paola and the sea that she began to feel in a very different world. Gone were the trees and fresh cool air of her hills; they were in a parched and desolate land of baked dry earth crisscrossed by gullies. Farmhouses stood on burnt-out mounds of yellowish soil where not a piece of green grew; nearly dry riverbeds were thick with flowering oleander bushes and rocks among the trickles of water or stagnant pools. And the people they passed were not like the people of the Sila, their people; these in the plains looked as yellow and dried-out as the soil. They were stunted, thin, weak creatures with sallow skin and deep-set, glazed eyes. A few exchanged greetings and asked where they were going. “America, ah yes,” they replied, as if sharing some secret; “we will follow if God is willing.”

“God!” said Zeno Saccà in a tone that sounded to Umbertina like blasphemy. “God has forgotten them and their land.”

“I did not know there were others worse off,” she said to Serafino. And he remained silent, keeping to himself what lay before them in New York.

Umbertina looked and considered as they journeyed; she saw why what they passed through was called the old country. The land was parched, thin, worn-out, dying. And she wondered if it had dried out because it was so aged; if so, how long before the New World would itself become old? And when that happened, when the new was used up and dried out, where would people go? Would that be the end of the world that Don Antonio was always preaching?

The sound of singing that came from a patch of olive trees they approached was like a wail solacing itself in the face of God’s indifference. It came from the heart of that scourged land as if from some antechamber of hell. It was a love song, but even love songs were wails of despair—the invitation to mate, to couple with one’s man to produce the children who would go on perpetuating, without knowing why, the misery of lost lands, lost prospects, lost lives.

The olive grove was at the edge of a barren plain, where it began to ascend into the mountains to the west of Cosenza, and then again they were among trees and shade. The road was incessantly winding, often doubling back upon itself up sides of gorges and skirting precipices. Once they passed a cross that Serafino said must have been set up to mark the place where a traveler was killed by bandits. But they, too poor to rob, passed unmolested.

It was still light when they descended into the coastal town whose Calabrian saint, Francesco di Paola, was namesake of Paolo, the infant Umbertina carried in her arms. The boat from Messina would stop in Paola and take them on to Naples for their departure across the ocean. They were weary from the long trip in the wagon, sitting on the bundles of belongings. The wagon driver from Soveria Mannelli left them at the marina below the town and they arranged their things around them, sitting in a silent circle facing the sea, which most of them had never seen before. There was no harbor; some fishing boats were pulled up on the sand; some people from the town had come down to wait at the shore for the boat from Messina. Dressed in uniform, the dazio officials, contemptuous and discourteous, poked through the poor bundles of the emigrants and asked what they had to declare.