L'Envers, in our family longer than anyone remembers The last time I visited L'Envers, our ancestral farm on the shady side of the Val Pellice in Italy's Piedmont, the arbor was covered with kiwi vines. I was 25 years old. That was my first - and until now, only - visit since toddlerhood.
In the first three years of my life, we lived on an air force base in France, affording multiple opportunities to join my mother's family across the Alps beneath the "treille" (French for trellis) draped with grape vines.
My mother first brought me to L'Envers as a baby, not yet one year old. Chubby and tan and mobile, unlike the Italian bambini kept swaddled on a diet of baked flour paste, I earned the nickname "raggio di sole" (sunbeam) from my mother's granny.
This month Amber and I joined my mother and her sister for an extended stay at L'Envers. I'm calling it "The Glorious Return," a bit tongue in cheek, after the legendary mountain crossing of our Pre-Reformation Protestant ancestors to these high alpine valleys from which they'd been driven. (Read my earlier blog post for this historic family back story.)
In the first three years of my life, we lived on an air force base in France, affording multiple opportunities to join my mother's family across the Alps beneath the "treille" (French for trellis) draped with grape vines.
My mother first brought me to L'Envers as a baby, not yet one year old. Chubby and tan and mobile, unlike the Italian bambini kept swaddled on a diet of baked flour paste, I earned the nickname "raggio di sole" (sunbeam) from my mother's granny.
This month Amber and I joined my mother and her sister for an extended stay at L'Envers. I'm calling it "The Glorious Return," a bit tongue in cheek, after the legendary mountain crossing of our Pre-Reformation Protestant ancestors to these high alpine valleys from which they'd been driven. (Read my earlier blog post for this historic family back story.)
Below, photos from the last time we were all together around the stone table under the trellis: my mom Jane holding me, next to her grandmother Mary Bellini Roland, my grandmother Helen Jervis holding my infant sister Cindy, my aunt Madeline holding my cousin Mary. In the next photo we toddlers have been released, and on the right, more of the family. In the next row, me and Mary on our mother's laps at the newly opened Dulles airport awaiting our flight to France; Mary and me toddling in front of the wood shed in L'Envers two years later; the same ladders in the loft of the refurbished shed today.
For my mother and aunt, too, it's been an historic return. They lived at L'Envers for a third of 1947 when they were 9 and 10 years old. As soon as civilian flights started up following the war, my Nonna decided it was time to introduce her American children to her Italian family (she and my Nonno had immigrated to the US on the eve of WWII). The night they arrived in Torre Pellice they were at the center of a huge family dinner at the town house on the Piazza Liberta (where I later stayed 41 years later as a 25 year-old traveling with my Nonna, and where we had dinner with cousins last week, after another 27 years elapsed). Walking around town as a child, my mother reports, "I had the extraordinary experience of frequently being recognized by strangers on the street as 'la ragazza Americana di Elena e Ernesto.' It suddenly felt as if I had a home town!
"To get to L’Envers, the family 'house in the country,'" my mother continues, "we had to walk through town, past the Waldensian cemetery, across the Pellice River on a bridge, then along a dirt road up the shady side of the valley. Approaching the house from the footpath, we crossed a meadow and saw it from below, a wide two-story house with large shuttered windows on the upper floor. Below the house was a large vegetable garden fenced with crossed sticks. The lower floor had a number of storage rooms, root cellars and the like. A steep climb at the right end of the house brought us to the upper level, with the front door to the house at our left, a grape arbor with a stone table and benches to the right, a large courtyard behind the house, and a two-story barn across the courtyard from the grape arbor. The far end of the main building, attached to the family house, was the house of the tenant farmer and his family. In 1947 there was still a lot of war damage visible in the house and in the vicinity."
My mom's memoir of their four months at L'Envers as children is a fantastic read. Since then, both she and Madeline have returned a number of times, but never as residents. L'Envers has passed through the male heirs in the family; the town house on the Piazza Liberta, to the females. Visits have been limited to a few hours, a glass of wine or a meal under the arbor. This year we had the great good fortune to be invited by our cousin Dan who is restoring the place (grapes back on the trellis, among many other improvements) to have it to ourselves, three weeks in all for my mom and aunt.
Irreverence aside, the return has been glorious indeed. I've documented its spectacular beauty and our various adventures on my Facebook page. Most important for me, though, has been the chance to inhabit the same rooms, roam the same hillsides under the same ancient chestnut trees, be dazzled by the same mountain peaks as generation upon generation of my matrilineal ancestors. To feel, in some ways as my mother did in 1947 - despite not speaking the language and barely knowing a soul - "as if I had a home town".
Upper left: my Nonna Elena Roland in large white collar with her brother Paulo to the left (killed by a sniper just after the war), and sister Anna on the far right holding baby brother Alberto, who also immigrated to the US; his son Dan is now the master of the house. Upper middle: My Nonno Ernesto Jervis. Upper right: my newlywed grandparents shortly before emigrating. Lower left: My Nonna, my mother, and me in the mountains above L'Envers in 1964. Lower right: The Glorious Return, Madeline and Jane in 2015.
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