Searching for Lionardo DiCapua: Part 1

My quest to learn all that I might about a famous maternal relative, born in Italy in 1617, began accidentally when I was a child living in Farrell, Pennsylvania. My mother’s two sisters lived near us, and it was during a visit to the house of the oldest sister, Aunt Maime, that I first heard about our remarkable ancestor, Lionardo DiCapua.

Lying near a bowl of licorice candy on the coffee table in her living room was a glossy, black and white postcard of a town square, peopled with several characters dressed in clothes from times past. There were no automobiles or scooters in the photo, only a donkey cart driven by a mustachioed man wearing a wide-brimmed hat. I could see what looked like statues in the center front of the square. A row of hedges, with bare trunks and foliage trimmed and elevated above the people, surrounded the four sides. Written on the reverse side of the postcard was a note penned in a beautiful script, in a language that I could not understand. A cancelled stamp from Italy occupied the right upper corner. In the left upper corner were the words “Piazza Lionardo DiCapua, Bagnoli, Irpino.” The outer edges of the card were scalloped, as if cut with pinking shears.

Aunt Maime told me that a relative, from Bagnoli, Irpino, had sent the card to her. She pointed to one of the statues, which was a bronze likeness of Lionardo DiCapua, after whom the piazza was named. She said he was an ancient relative, a very wise man who was a famous doctor and writer born in Bagnoli,Irpino, the DiCapua family’s ancestral town. In retrospect, I wish I had asked my aunt for that postcard, which made quite an impression on me, both in its antique style and the pride that it provoked. I can still remember how impressed I was that someone, in our otherwise plebian family, would actually have a square named after him, and a statue erected in his honor.

I cannot recall hearing any other stories about Lionardo from the rest of my mother’s family, but I carried the hope that someday I would visit the town and see the piazza and the statue myself.

That opportunity came in the summer of 1983 on my first trip to Italy. I spent the first five days in Rome then took a train to Avellino where a distant cousin met me that night at the station then drove me to Bagnoli, Irpino. The next morning, my cousins, Genaro and his brother, Pasqualino, walked me to the main piazza to see Lionardo’s statue – a bronze bust of the great man wearing period clothes, and a tight-fitting beanie-like hat, holding one of his more famous books in one hand with the snake wrapped caduceus, the symbol of his medical calling, in the other. It was a singular moment in my life and I’m unashamed to say that it brought tears to my eyes. My cousins, carrying similar, operatic, Italian genes as I, appreciated my sentiment. Together, we walked around the periphery of the piazza, under the elevated hedge, the three of us arm-in-arm, in typical Italian fashion like the other locals strolling in near proximity to the bronze memorial of our great ancestor. After completing that first procession, we walked a short distance down one of the streets that radiated from the piazza to see the house where Lionardo had been born.

I returned multiple times to the square throughout the next week. I’d sit on a bench and observe kids playing while older locals walked around the hedge-lined piazza sharing gossip, telling sad or happy stories, perhaps complaining about the weather or a bothersome neighbor, probably just like the people pictured in Aunt Maime’s postcard had been doing. I had made initial contact with my famous ancestor, but there was still much to learn about his life. What had he accomplished that brought such notoriety? I was determined to find out.

Thank you for reading and please read part 2 of my blog Searching for Lionardo DiCapua to learn more.