Marco, Tone and Bob

In the spring of 2001, dad phoned me, said that he, and his cousin Bob, were thinking of going over to Amalfi in September and asked me if I wanted to go with him. It was a no-brainer of course.

We stayed at Bob's place in Slough the night before the flight. The flight was an early one from Heathrow and was to Rome. Not Naples. From Fiumicino, we got the shuttle to Roma Termini and from there we got the Eurostar Italia to Salerno. The buffet car on the train was superb. It had a real bar in it. There was a corner bar with bar stools and the rest of the carriage was filled up with cafe tables and chairs. A proper bar. We'd only just left the 'burbs of Rome when dad fell asleep and me and Bob went up to the bar for a drink and spent the rest of the journey there.

We'd rented an apartment that you had to climb a few steps to get to but once you got used to it, it was alright. It was a nice flat.

Bob was an instant hit with Maria, Luigi and everyone else to whom he was introduced. He's one of those charming characters that lights a place up ... and he looks the part; totally Italian. Like an extra from the set of La Dolce Vita.

We had a cracking time. Three fellas in Amalfi just enjoying the craic. The sun was hot, the food was good and the wine was better. The main occupation was sitting in the Piazza del Duomo with a drink watching the world go by.

There were a couple of things that stick in my memory though. The first was a really strange thing. Me and Bob went out on the boat to Capri - left dad reading on the beach. There was a 'couple' (English) who were all over each other like a rash but everything that they said and did suggested that they were father and daughter. Creepy!

The second was a Scottish couple to whom dad got talking. They were very pleasant and we spent almost an entire evening with them. We were sat at a restaurant in the main square and I was chatting to the chef (Sergio) who said, in passing, that dad had a real amalfitana face. I passed Sergio's comments on and the girl 'accused' me of trying to be an Italian. Told me I was an Englishman and should be happy with that. I was gobsmacked. Speechless. How could she have misunderstood so completely? I spent the rest of the evening speaking to Sergio, his wife and his sister-in-law. No point in talking to her. She didn't understand anything.

The third 'event' was one that shook the world. I was sat with a beer outside the Caffe Royal in the Piazza del Duomo with Bob. It was about half past three when one of the brothers who owns the place turned up for work. "There's been an aircrash". I looked up at him bemused. Confused. "In New York. An aircrash." I thought no more of it. I'll catch it on the news later.

Then, a little while later, one of his brothers came past. "Ue, Criscuolo! You'd better get home and get your gun. There's going to be a war." My face must have been a picture. "Two planes have crashed into a skyscraper in New York." An American couple sat front of us heard the mention of New York and asked me what it was about. I told her what I had been told. "Which skyscraper?" I shook my head. "No idea."

I shouted into the cafe. "Which skyscraper?" "Le torri gemelle." The twin towers. The American woman nearly died. "That's where my office is." I went inside to watch the news on the telly and report back. The Italian newscaster told of the two airliners crashing into the twin towers and a third crashing into the Pentagon. There was another story though that disappeared without a trace after about half an hour without any trace of an explanation - a fourth airliner had been shot down by USAF fighter aircraft.

We spent that evening with one of dad's and Bob's cousins - Matteo. Looking back, it was strange. The disaster that was to become known as 9/11 really didn't intrude into the holiday. It was too remote. Too unreal ... like everything in the 'outside world' when you're on holiday. The holiday seems to insulate you from reality.

There was one other thing. One evening, Bob and I went up to this piano bar looking for a bit of action. We went in and the place was empty apart from the barman. We ordered a drink and asked when we could expect it to liven up a bit. The barman promised us faithfully that it wouldn't take long. We left an hour later and went back to the Piazza del Duomo. There was a lot more life in the square ... and we could hear ourselves think.

On a more mundane level, by the end of this third visit it was getting so that I couldn't walk down the street without someone saying hello; how ya doin'? I was starting to feel at home in the place. To feel at ease; comfortable.

Like a rubber ball ...

Most of the rest of that holiday was spent going to and fro' from Amalfi to Pontone with one trip out to Capri. You can see why Tiberius Claudius Nero, Maxim Gorkiy and Gracie Fields fell in love with the place. It is stunning. Totally overrun by tourists though; and for someone who has an innate allergy to tourists, the only escape was to walk up to one of Tiberius' villas - Villa Iovis (the Villa of Jupiter). Because the only way to get there was to walk ... half way up a mountain, it was gratifyingly quiet.

There was a terrace that overlooked the sea. In fact, it overhung the sea and it is said that it is the point from which he used to have those thrown who had displeased him. It was looking over the edge of the wall that, for the first time in my life, I experienced an overwhelming fear of falling. Nearly wretched my guts up. I spent the rest of the day staying as far away from the edge (any edge) as it was possible to get.

We spent days, or parts of days, out in Positano, Maiori, Minori, Sorrento and, as always, I did my best to blend in; not to be a tourist. It's not easy when your wife's got bright red hair and freckled white skin and you're the only one who speaks Italian.

When I got back to Crewe, I felt a certain sense of satisfaction and achievement. I felt that I'd sort of completed the circle that was broken when Nicola died in 1947. That was never part of the promise although I think it became part of the mission as I got older. Of course, the promise will never have been properly fulfilled until they put me in a hole in the ground; I had promised, after all, never to forget that I am Italian. I'd gone further though ... I think. I'd taken the first step toward putting the family back together again and that felt alright.

We went back in October 2000 only without dad this time. We spent a good deal more time with Maria and Luigi. Maria introduced us to other relatives - dad's second cousins, my third and my son's fourth. Hey. A cousin's a cousin, right? We were introduced to Marisa (and her husband Gennaro), Rosita (her husband Domenico and their kids Mara and Gianluca), Orazio and one hundred and one others.

This time, for the first time, something else happened; on a number of occasions. People would stop me and ask me whether I was from round 'yer. I'd explain that I wasn't but that I had family here. "Who's your family?" I'd reel off a list of names and their relationship to me, dad and grampa and they'd say something like, "ah yes. I know who you are." They didn't of course. Not in the sense we would understand the statement. But they knew where I fit into their world and their community.

I was chuffed to nuts. There was clearly something about my appearance that made them ask the question in the first place which meant that I must look like I belong there. My face fit. Without wanting to get all schmaltzy, I don't think I ever felt that at any other time, with the possible exception of those three years at the polytechnic.

Wonderment and awe

Our trip to Pompeii was an organized trip. We spent the whole day following an ageing gentleman called Lorenzo around the city while he held a garishly coloured, folded umbrella above his head so that we could follow him around like a troop of goslings following their mother goose. For a snob like me who hates being a tourist, it was pure torture - rescued by the fact that I managed to transport myself sufficiently far back in time that 'Renzo's presence didn't bother me any more.

We went on from Pompeii to the workshop of the blacksmiths to the Gods. The bus took us most of the way up and we walked the last twenty minutes or so. There was a fella handing out walking sticks - aparently for free but, of course, they weren't. He needed a tip. We took a stick, handed him a few grand and headed up to the caldera. It was unfortunate that it was quite a hazy sort of day so that you could barely see the bay of Naples and you couldn't see much further south than Salerno, if you could see that far.

Having been to Pompeii and Vesuvius, we started to feel adventurous and decided to take on Herculaneum and Paestum. Herculaneum is, in many ways, better than Pompeii. Apart from the fact that all of the ovine tourists go to Pompeii and none of them go to Herculaneum, through an accident of the eruption and the way it landed on the two cities, the woodwork in Herculaneum survived (albeit carbonized) whereas that in Pompeii simply disappeared.

Ercolano was brilliant although I was almost embarrassed to find that none of the photos I took there were any good. Rubbish. Every single one. I shall have to go back and rectify the matter.

Paestum, like Neapolis, Pompeii and Herculaneum (and a lot of the other cities in southern Italy) were Greek cities. Part of the glorious entity that was Magna Grecia. Even though it was nowhere near as well preserved as either of the two Vesuvian cities, it was good enough to impress ... and some. Seriously heavy Greek temples. The sort of stuff you only expect in Athens.

We were guided around the place by an extremely classily dressed young Italian lady (a history student?) who appeared to know her stuff and was happy to call me family when she discovered that my family came from Scala - the town where she was born and bred. I'd like to think that it was my natural Italian good looks that led her to seek the familial connection so readily but it really doesn't matter. This greying 39 year-0ld spent the rest of the tour around the city chatting to her and feeling very privileged as a result.

Apart from anything else, the fact that I could chat to the guide in her own language and even in her own accent (I can't do the dialect but I can do the accent) separated me from the rest of the ovine tourists.

On the 24th day of August in the year of our Lord 79 ...

Before the first week of our holidays had passed, I had managed to fulfil another of my long-standing ambitions. Since I was in my early teens I had always wanted to be an archaeologist. Unfortunately for me there were a couple of obstacles in my that I was unable to overcome. In order to study archaeology in the olden days, you had to have A levels in 'The Classics' and I was at a comprehensive school that had thrown the baby out with the bathwater and had renounced as the work of the devil anything that smacked of the old grammar school system.

So. I ended up with poor A levels in French and German (Ds) and an O level in Latin (a C) that the head had very graciously allowed a few of us to do. Not enough to get me in to University College London to study archaeology though. No Greek. No qualifications on the works of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Gaius Julius Caesar or Gaius Valerius Catullus. No view on the ideas of Aristotle or Plato or the histories of Herodotus.

Anyway, the dream (if it could be said to be a dream any longer rather than simply an interest) continued and, in that October in 1999, I finally got to Pompeii. Amazing. Haunting. Evocative. Chaotic ... and full to the brim of American and Japanese tourists. Still, I loved it and could have wandered its streets aimlessly for days, trying to imagine the people who had lived, and died, there; imagining talking to them in my imperfect Latin.

We went to the theatres, the arena, the gymnasium, the gladiator barracks, the public baths (loads of them), the posh houses and the hovels, the bakeries, the take-aways and the shops ... and the brothel. The lupanara. Amazing. Stunning. And all in the awesome shadow of that mountain. The workshop of Hephaestus and Vulcan - the blacksmith of the Gods. Vesuvius.

This was where my roots lie. This is what my people came from even if it's not where my people came from. Where was H G Wells when you needed him?

Getting to know you

The next day we got the bus up to Pontone to Maria's for lunch ... and dinner. I think we must have got the quarter past 10 and arrived about twenty or so minutes later. The bus can't actually get into the village so it stops at a point as far up the mountain as it can feasibly get. There's a sort of lay-by built into the side of the mountain that allows the bus to turn round and head on toward Scala and Ravello. From there we walked into Pontone, across the bijou little square and up to Maria's place.

Lunch was a feast - pasta followed by meat followed by vegetables followed by salad followed by fruit followed by cheese, olives, salami, chestnuts and Lord knows what else - and all washed down with vino paesano.

I love vino paesano (peasant wine). It's one of those things that should go on everybody's 'bucket list'. It's your honest-to-God basic wine made the way God intended. They crush the grapes, let the juice do its own thing for about a year and then drink it. It doesn't taste like anything that we would recognize as wine. It tastes of grapes. Now there's a thing. Maria's wine was never particularly strong (although I have drunk stuff that was much stronger) so we would happily get through two or three bottles in a sitting.

We were persuaded to stay for dinner. I have to concede that we didn't take a lot of persuading. You can keep all your fancy chefs with their fancy restaurants and their Michelin stars. I can safely say, without fear of contradiction, that I have never tasted food as good as the stuff that comes out of Maria's kitchen (is that cliché No. 2?).

Dinner was another half-a-dozen courses of ambrosia washed down with more vino paesano and all topped off with a couple of glasses of home made limoncello straight out of the freezer.

What more could any man ask for? To be sat on a roof terrace that looks out over Amalfi, the sea and the mountains eating five or six courses of heaven, drinking vino paesano and finishing with the sublime taste of home-made limoncello.

Perfection? Not quite. Neither Maria nor Luigi (both in their 60s) spoke Italian. Pure dialect. Pure Neapolitan (Neapolitan being the generic term for the dialect that is spoken in Campania, Puglia and Calabria. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and all that good stuff). The result was that they could understood every word I spoke but I understood only maybe 60% of what they said.

Let me intoduce myself ...

On the second day in Amalfi (it must have been a Sunday), I plucked up the courage, and we decided to walk up the scalinata to Pontone. It's a hell-of-a-walk. These stone stairways have been there for donkeys' years and they are still well used. They link the coast to the villages in the mountains. The hinterland.

We walked up the the mountain and I have to say that it was a stunning walk. Whether you looked back at where you'd come from (Amalfi) or forward to where you were going (Scala) it was breathtaking. It's one of those places that makes you feel totally insignificant and is all the better for that.

When you get to the top of the stairs, you have to cross a road and then, up a few more stairs, you enter the village square. It's a gorgeous little square. There's the church (of San Giovanni) and a bar. There are also a couple of drinking fountains. The square itself is built on the side of the mountain and protrudes from the mountainside. It's a sort of a terrace.

The four of us chose a table in the square and I went into the bar and ordered the drinks. Ice Cold in Alex for me and the lady. Dad had something non-alcoholic and my son almost certainly joined us in a beer ... or did he have a Coke. I really should have kept a contemporaneous record of all this.

I finally plucked up the courage to appraoch the barman - a gentleman called Gianfranco Criscuolo. I asked him where the local cemetry was - I wanted to see if I could find any of my fathers' graves. It's in Scala, on the top of another mountain and the quickest way there is back into Amalfi to get a bus up to Scala.

So. I got my scroll out. My descendants tree showing all the descendants of Luigi Criscuolo and his wife Brigida - who must have been born in the early decades of the 19th century. I spread it out on the top of a wall and we were quickly joined by an another gentleman called Andrea Criscuolo. I have to say that neither were directly related to me. Poring over the family tree, Gianfranco and Andrea pointed to one name after another - she lives down the road and No. 13. He's her brother and lives with her. He lives in Minuta across the mountain there. He lives down there in Amalfi.

I decided to take the details - such as they were - of the lady who lived at No. 13. We went to the house and rang the bell. No answer. We went back to the bar, had another beer and went back and rang the bell again. Still no answer.

Between visits to No. 13, I talked to Andrea (known locally as 'O Maresciallo because his father was a Marshall of the Police Force). At one point he looked at me, fag in hand, and said "I know your double". I must have looked at him quizzically because he nodded vigorously and repeated his assertion. "Honest. I know your double". That double turned out to be one of my dad's second cousins (Matteo Criscuolo) and there is a definite likeness - bearing in mind that he is twenty years my senior.

Eventually, having written a note, explaining who I was, what I was doing and where I was staying (with address and telephone number - I didn't have a moby at this stage) and left it in the gate at No. 13, we walked back down the stairs to Amalfi.

That evening as we were leaving the hotel to find somewhere to eat, an elderly couple crossed the square towards us. They took one look at dad and said "Siete Criscuolo?" Dad looked at me and I looked at them and nodded. "Si. Siamo Criscuolo." They kissed us - the way that friends and relatives do in civilized societies - and introduced themselves. Maria and Luigi Criscuolo. Brother and sister.

I explained that we were looking for a restaurant to have something to eat and invited them to join us. Not a chance. You don't need to eat in no restaurant. They took us to a house up the road and introduced us to other cousins (dad's second cousins and my third) and we talked and talked and talked about people and times and places.

They had accepted me ... us ... as family. No questions asked. They had known Nicola Criscuolo - zio Nicola - and remembered him coming over to see them. What's more, Maria was incredibly like auntie Marie. The way she looked, moved, talked, fussed. Everything. Dad cried for the family he'd lost and I wasn't far from doing the same if I'm honest.

We were home. No question. We had family there and that was enough to ensure that we belonged there.

My name is Criscuolo. Marco Criscuolo

We were staying in a little family-run hotel called Hotel Lidomare. It was set back from the main square (Piazza del Duomo) on a kind of small square of its own. The real beauty of the place though was that it was two minutes walk from the the Piazza del Duomo and about a minute more from the front.

Criscuolo is a local surname and it gave me immediate cred as someone who belonged there. If you're at all curious, you can go to http://gens.labo.net/, type 'Criscuolo' in the search field in the top left hand corner and hit the red arrow. It'll give you a lovely visual display of the distribution of the Criscuolos in Italy. It'll do the same, of course, for any surname.

On the first day there - it was a Saturday - I seem to recall that we walked up the stone mountain stairway (scalinata) to Pogerola. It was a stunning walk and breathtaking in every sense of the word. Some 800 steps to the top left all except dad pretty much knackered by the time we got to the top.

Much and all as I couldn't wait to go to Pontone, I was scared. Petrified of what I'd find. Scared stiff that I'd be disappointed. Afraid that I'd be rejected. What would I do, I asked myself, if someone I'd never met in my life turned up on my doorstep insisting that he (or she) was my long lost cousin? I didn't know the answer and I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to know it.

While I was building up my courage, I started to get my bearings around the place. This was heaven. This was, without doubt, a place where I could happily live and die. Like I said, my surname gave me immediate credibility. Criscuolo. It was local. Combined with the fact that I spoke Italian, with a southern accent, and without any trace of an English accent, it was a real asset.

I started making friends. Friends who, many years later would turn out to be real, solid friends. The first of them was a gentleman - a real gentleman - called Alfonso Lucibello. A man of real dignity and serenity. A man of boundless generosity. Over the years he has become a friend for whom I would definitely walk five hundred miles.

Dad looked the part. After one day in the place he looked the part. He only had to walk out into the sun for his skin to suddenly take on that rich Mediterannean bronze colour. He has that rugged southern Italian face too ... and the schnoz. The only thing that picked him out from the locals was the fact that he couldn't speak a word of Italian.

I really enjoyed that first day. It was barmy. Laid back. Italian. I was still petrified about the adventure up to Pontone that I knew had to come but I was starting to feel easier about it. The reception that I was getting from the people to whom I wasn't related was starting to make me feel a little easier about the whole thing.

The time has come the walrus said ...

By 1998, I had decided that I was ready. I had all the information that I needed. It was time to try again. To try again to go back to Amalfi. It wasn't really a going back of course because I'd never been there but that's what it felt like.

I had no idea how to go about organizing it. No idea where to start. What to expect. What to do. It must have been early in 1999 when I went to my local Thompson (or is that Thomson? No. It's definitely Thompson) and booked a package deal ... for me, my wife and my 9-year-old son.

It suddenly occurred to me (or maybe it was to my wife that it occurred) that we had to take dad. We had to ask him at the very least whether he wanted to come along. The name 'Pontone' was as much a part of his identity as it was a part of mine. He said yes. There were going to be three generations of Criscuolo making the journey. It all seemed so right.

On a gorgeous day in October 1999 (I'm ashamed to say that I can't remember what date it was), we took off from Manchester airport bound for Naples. It was late morning when we landed at Capodichino airport and after having been churned through the mill through which arriving tourists are ground when they arrive at any airport anywhere in the world, we got on the coach that was to take us to Amalfi.

Out of the airport, onto the Autostrada del Sole and southwards until we cut west onto the Sorrento peninsula. Through Cava dei Tirreni, Vietri sul Mare, Cetara, Maiori and Minori - mountainscapes of outstanding beauty - with the sun beating down on our coach and my heart leaping out of my chest we wound our way until we reached the last headland - Capo del Orso - and turned the last bend.

Then I saw it. Just like on that old picture postcard. Was this home? Was this real? Had I finally made it? I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Our hotel was just off the main square - Piazza del Duomo - and we were very soon booked. Stood on the balcony dad and I looked out over the marinas ... and cried.

... to the ridiculous?

In October 1989, having left the RAF in 1987, worked as a furniture packer and carrier for a removals firm in West Berlin until December 1988, moved back to C'Martin in Devon, had my first and only son and married a completely mad Irish girl (his mother), I arrived in Crewe. South Cheshire. Cheshire Life? Not really. In fact, not at all.

I'd got a job as a civil servant - in London - in September 1989 and we moved up to Crewe in October. It was an economic imperative that had forced me further north than I'd ever been before. Starting from scratch again, we couldn't afford to stay in the south. So I lived in the north and worked in the south ... and eventually got a transfer up to Liverpool after about 18 months.

Throughout this period the promise had been put very much on the back burner, as it were. There had been too much else to worry about. By '92 or '93 though, things were starting to settle down. I'd got my feet under the desk at work, we were starting to get the house (an 1883 mid-terrace) in some sort of shape and I'd managed to get a computer and I had time to 'play' with it.

Whenever I had to go to meetings in London (which was quite frequently), I'd arrange the meeting for the morning and then take the afternoon off and spend it in the Family Record Centre in Islington. Slowly, I started to pick up the pace and then - probably about '95 or '96 (it may have been earlier than that but I really can't remember) - the best thing since sliced bread happened. I got the internet - with Compuserve. You remember them? Your email address was a series of numbers and I could never remember what my series of numbers was.

It was access to the internet that allowed me to make an enormous leap towards fulfilment of the promise. One day I did a search on an email directory for anyone living in Amalfi. I found a whole list of them and I picked out a few names at random. I made up a descendants report from Family Tree Maker, attached it to my emails, explained what I was doing and fired them off to their unsuspecting recipients.

Only a week or so later I got a response from one of them - a Signor Cantalupo (I wish I could remember his first name) - who said that he was delighted to 'meet' someone who was interested in researching his Italian roots and he promised to do what he could to help.

A couple of weeks later I got an email from him and when I read the attachment I was gobsmacked. He'd traced my family forwards (not backwards) from my great-great-great-grandfather Luigi Criscuolo who was born at the beginning of the 19th century to my dad's second cousins and my third cousins.

When I'd written my exploratory email, I hadn't specified, as far as I can remember, whether I wanted to go back in time or come forward but, looking back, I think I was probably hoping to go further back in time. Signor Cantalupo had done what I only realized I'd always wanted to do when I read his email. He had given me the key to put me in touch with living relatives.

For the moment, of course, they were only names on a computer programme but every name on that newly expanded family tree held the potential to lead me by the hand to the fulfilment of the promise. All I had to do was want it and not be afraid of it.

I tre amici

In the summer of 1985 I went back to Piovene for what turned out to be the last time. I'm not really sure why it turned out that way and have always been sorry that it did but arguably not sorry enough to do anything about it. Idleness? Quite probably.

Anyway. In the summer of 1985 I returned to Piovene with two comrades-in-arms - Mark Townsend and Malcolm Drummond Ashleigh Cooke (I'm sure the Ashleigh was spelt that way but ...). Of the three of us, Mal was the only one who could drive and therefore the only one with a car. He had a lovely bright red XR3i and that was to be our chariot for the journey from Gatow in West Berlin to Piovene Rochette in Italy - 987 km. Actually, that's 987 km now that Germany has been reunited. At the time we had to go down the central corridor from West Berlin to Helmstedt and only then cut south to Italy and that took the journey up to 1,147 km.

It was a cracking holiday. We stayed in a bed & breakfast in Piovene and Paola and Fulvio took us around to all sorts of places ... and to Venice of course.

One day Mal decided that we were going to go to Lido di Iesolo. I wasn't that keen simply 'cos I don't like tourist traps but I went along under protest. We booked rooms in a hotel for two people because we didn't have enough cash on us for three and then went out. Mal and Mark ended up chatting up a couple of German housewives on a girls' holiday while I sat, uninterested, disinterested and bored, watching the pidgin interaction between them. Eventually, they decided that it was time to go back to the hotel. By this time it was lashing down with rain and ... guess what. Nobody could remember where the hotel was. We traipsed the streets of Lido for hours in the pouring rain and finally found it.

I slept on the floor of the room and tried to sneak out early in the morning. I was caught sneaking out but managed to persuade the receptionist that I'd only come in to the hotel to wake the lads up. I'm certain that the fella didn't believe me but after a while he stopped arguing with me.

Tired, wet and hungry, we headed back to Piovene. We came back to a very narked Paola. Narked that we'd disappeared without saying anything. I'd anticipated this and it was one of the reasons I hadn't wanted to simply disappear. Anyway, over dinner that evening all was forgiven as I recounted the daring adventures Mal, Mark and Marco in Lido to uncontrollable fits of laughter of a room full of Italians. The two lads were sat in the middle of it all, not understanding a word that was said and knowing that it was their adventures that had everyone in fits.

I enjoyed that couple of weeks but it had been frustrating. All I had wanted to do was chill with Paola and Fulvio. The lads wanted to get out on the pull and drink. We ended up heading back to Berlin early because they'd got bored. I could have stayed there for months. Nobody's fault of course. Des gouts et des couleurs. That's all.

I never heard from Paola and Fulvio again. I wrote a few times but they never wrote back. Another door shut behind me. Maybe they'd outgrown me. In the seven years since we'd first met, she'd matured; grown up. I very much suspect that I hadn't. Life in the armed forces was never particularly conducive to the maturation of young men. Maybe I still haven't.