But even at best, and in the good season, the Hollow at a quick glance from the street seemed drab and poor—the other side of the tracks. It was picturesque to the outsider, the American who lived uptown on an elm-lined street with wide lawns and front porches where everyone sat and swung in view of everyone else, where windows were large enough to show the rooms inside, and where backyards were wasteful with little fringes of flowerbeds but no vegetables or grapevines or fruit trees. Guinea Gulch, as the Americans called the Hollow, was to them a part of town where peddlers trundled handcarts through the streets calling out “Es-ca-ro-la! Verdura!” and where women in dark dresses with aprons around their waists and kerchiefs over their hair could be seen carrying home bundles of dandelion greens in thick loads on their heads.

It was mysterious, too, in the Hollow. The houses had the closed look of fortresses—front windows shuttered or draped, no front porch for sitting, no front yard, no opening to the stranger. It was the suspiciousness of the Old World come to the New—the still-dominant peasant mentality that no one should see the extent of a person’s fortune.

At John Street the embraces Serafino’s family exchanged with their countrymen were again full of feeling. Tears of gratitude silently streamed down Umbertina’s cheeks when Cristina Muzzi and her daughters pressed food and drink on them as the ritual feeding of long-lost paesani began.

Lodgings had been found for the Longobardis in a three-story wooden structure which, they were amazed to learn, Annicharico the baker owned. It was like a palazzo—wood, yes, but still high as a palazzo.

On Labor Day, a few days after their arrival, a large festa was organized in Muskieville, just across the river from Cato, on the lands Giovanni Muzzi rented at the farm of James Brown. They pulled up to a field beyond Brown’s farmhouse and barn, and there were other wagons full of people to welcome them. The calabresi of Cato, both familiar and unfamiliar, expressed their feelings of satisfaction at the safe arrival of more of them in the exchange of sarcasms and twittings that buoyed up spirits, recharged confidence, and allayed the sense of lost birthplace that the sight of newcomers always brought to mind.

It was a beautiful day of late summer, one of those unique upstate days when skies are perfectly limpid and the horizon stretches far and nature is a marvel of beauty with just the hint of being at its peak and therefore fleeting. Umbertina gave thanks in her heart as she looked over the fields and saw what the earth produced here. Ci siamo!—we’ve made it—she thought over and over.