When they knelt on the shore for the priest’s benediction, there was fear in their hearts. Some kissed the priest’s hand; some pressed their last coin into it and asked that a candle be lit in the church for their intention.

“These are bad times,” said the priest at the end. “I will pray for you and may the Good Lord attend you. You heard how the captain spoke. This is what happens from imprisoning the pope and setting up priest-hating governments.”

Zeno Saccà turned to his brother and gave a disgusted grunt. “La political” he said. “Even as we’re leaving!”

From the boat rowing out to the steamer, Umbertina could see the black shapes of mountains looming behind the few flickering lights of the town. She said a prayer to St. Francis.

“Good-bye to the old country,” said Zeno Saccà buoyantly, “and long live the new!” From deep within her Umbertina echoed his assurance that the new, though unknown, was going to be better. Perhaps it was the taste of the orange, its sweetness still in her mouth, that made the future seem to her so full of promise.

“I wonder how the New World will be,” Bruno said reflectively.

Serafino, standing nearby, answered, “A land where we arrive like infants, and where we have no past.”

“Then we will make our memories and our history,” Zeno retorted.

In Naples there commenced the noise and crowds that Umbertina would ever after associate with lo strappo, the uprooting. In Castagna people had been poor, too, but quiet and proud; here instead, in the city, were street urchins, beggars, cripples, and whores all gesturing and importuning. Some Neapolitans, cocky and already using their sharp city ways to prey upon the country people, whom they called terroni, were among the Abruzzesi, the Calabrians, and the emigrants from the Lazio, Campana, and Basilicata regions; all were destined for America, as if all of Italy were going across the sea. The tiny group from Castagna and Soveria Mannelli clung to each other among those other “Italians,” who were, in fact, the first foreigners they met. All was different now for Umbertina, who had begun to live among strangers.

She saw them there, on the boat, a herd of people all headed in one direction for different purposes: those with trades and skills, who could be barbers or tailors in America and looked down on the peasants; those who went seasonally for immediate gain—to get some money and then return, better off, to their old home; those from the city who accompanied the peasants like parasites, sensing that they could profit from their ignorance in the New World; those like Serafino, who went humbly looking for any honest labor by which to earn bread; those like the Saccà brothers, who went with a kind of idealism, looking for a government of men more just than the one they were rejecting; those like Cristina Muzzi, who went passively, caught up in a drama they didn’t even recognize, destined to be the same in the New World as they had been wherever they came from in the Old; and finally, there were some like Umbertina, who believed they were the sacrificial catalysts of change, the ones who were to give their children two births—life itself and new life in the New World.