Gina Palmucci, 1891-1924. She took the stage name of Nera Marmora, and sang like a nightingale according to contemporary accounts. She was my grandmother..
The news that Luciano Pavarotti died last week made the rounds, reaching out so far as to impact my sister in Italy whose computer literacy is so low she doesn't really trust e-mails to arrive at their destination. Yet she was moved to send me one about that piece of news. She has never heard an opera sung in person or on a recording, she has no knowledge of the world outside her small village where she has lived for most of her sixty years and she only thought of me when Pavarotti died because she knows I have traveled far and wide to hear those roles my grandmother sang. Unlike Nera Marmora, Luciano Pavarotti sacrificed everything to bring his music, and himself to the masses, even unto those like my sister whose idea of music is nowhere near Cavalleria Rusticana,
even though she has practically lived the story herself...
.
My siblings and I grew up with the knowledge that we had a singer in our family but we knew next to nothing of her, just a stage name and some tidbits from her life: that she had sung with Enrico Caruso, a man who rivalled Pavarotti's ability to reach a non-operatic audience. Yet Gina Palmucci, my grandmother, who lived and died in the early part of the twentieth century never made a recording or gave an interview and would have vanished were it not for her niece who made available photos and posters and programs that allowed the city of Terni to create a book marking one of its most talented offspring.
Terni, an industrial city in the pastoral Umbrian region doesn't have many famous antecedents, its Roman roots in the city of Interamna are largely forgotten, and the city was bombed flat by the Americans in World War Two thanks to its steel mills and its Beretta arms factory. Apartment blocks and streets built to a grid, American style, mark the modern city nestled in a region famous for its medieval hill towns. 
My grandmother's brother Pasquale worked all his life as an accounts clerk in the steel mill, and I see the old man I knew inside the happy youth on the left in this picture, standing next to his already famous sister:
The city was moved to put up a monument to my grandmother where she lived in the city's old section which has been gentrified and rehabbed, as is the way worldwide in the twenty-first century. 
My mother, who died when I was a teenager, never ever spoke, as far as I can recall, of her mother, and I believe that was in large part because her father blamed her for his beloved wife's death. Nera Marmora retired from the stage to live the decorous life of a wife and mother in 1923, and she died in childbirth a year later.Her husband, my grandfather, never did recover from the blow of her sudden death and the secret family legend is he never learned to love his only child as a result of that misfortune. Now they are all dead and only we, the generation that remembers none of that drama, remain alive.
I am now older than my mother was when she died, and my own life has slipped into middle age alongside the career of the great Pavarotti whose talents were on display from when I can remember. I saw him sing in assorted theaters around the world and I heard the praise heaped upon his voice, the voice of a man who pumped his talent for all it was worth. He divorced his wife and settled down with his secretary, he ate prodigiously and sang as long as he could. I guess he enjoyed life. And now its done and he is no longer a living legend.Though still a household name even in farmhouses like my sister's where neither a book nor a libretto ever crosses the threshold. Thats a hell of an achievement, no matter what the cost we observed at the Maestro's two-family funeral.
My own sister in her e-mail reminded me of one night at La Scala in Milan, when the performance commemorated in the frontispiece of the program the first night decades before, in the same theater. And there she was, my grandmother, listed for all to see and none to know. I should have known better, because in the book I now own there is a reproduction of the front page of the score of a new performance of an opera by Giacomo Puccini, signed by the composer himself to the distinguished artist, suave voice of Mimi. 
In considering my grandmother's career one sees she had the seeds of greatness sown within her. She sang with Caruso and went on tour with him in South America in 1917. She was selected by Arturo Toscanini, a conductor who left his mark on the world at large, to sing in the premiere of the re-opening of La Scala after World War One, she was praised for her beauty and her voice wherever she went. And she gave it all up to get married to a country squire of little account and thence to sink into obscurity. He wasn't a bad man at all, and got a piazza named after him.
He also got his own monument put up after the war celebrating his bravery helping partisans and allied fliers escape the clutches of the Nazis.
A good man he may have been but not famous. My grandmother's choice to marry him was the sort of choice that in a media obsessed world would get one labeled insane.
He also got his own monument put up after the war celebrating his bravery helping partisans and allied fliers escape the clutches of the Nazis. A good man he may have been but not famous. My grandmother's choice to marry him was the sort of choice that in a media obsessed world would get one labeled insane. .
She was just insanely unlucky that her choice led to her premature death and the gradual dismemberment over two generations of the family that was to be descended from her. I suppose a stone plaque to mark the passing of a human life is no bad thing, especially when the life lived has been a perpetual struggle with unhappiness. But when all is said and done, how could I not be drawn, with all this pent up history of family sadness behind me, to the only land where the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the rules to live by?
The alarm goes off at 4:45 and I roll quickly out of bed before I have time to think about it. The house is cool, thanks to the air conditioner and the fans swirling in each of our four rooms, moving the air steadily round our little house. We have no street lights on our road and outside its completely dark, at least it is two weeks out of the month. This period is the other half of the month and the moon, waning is doing its best to imitate daylight.
They call themselves the Southernmost Coffee Roasting Company, which I suppose they are, even though they are a lot less southernmost than they used to be. There was a time when they were roasting and grinding and selling in downtown Key West, but then they decided that the call of commerce required them to move 15 miles out of town. Somehow they made it work, turning coffee roasting into a cottage industry selling knick knacks and gee gaws and pastries and chocolates and offering free hot coffee after hurricanes. They aren't open at 5:30am so its a matter of buzzing on by.
The Cuban exile community in Florida gained steam after the revolutionary attempt in the 187o's, when their exiled socialist leader Jose Marti landed in Key West to lead the fight from this flowered isle that stood side by side with the struggle for a new Cuba, as mentioned in more or less poetic, incomprehensible Spanish at the Jose Marti monument in Key West's Bayview Park:
Key West being a Paradoxical Paradise, Bayview Park is a park that has no view of any Bay; its all blocked by 21st century capitalist development, in all its cement glory. Jose Marti shares his corner with dozens of less fortunate "residentially challenged" local residents who huddle and drink and squabble behind his roccoco home in the corner. It has the flavor of huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but he is silent on that and they are more like chickens than revolutionaries, as they scrabble in the sun for alcohol and oblivion, not redemption and freedom.
The paper reports today that a big voice in the exile community was in Key West yesterday to sing some songs about this political paradox, to sing these songs for the first time ever in public. The new album is called Noventa Millas, and anytime you mention ninety miles in Key West you are talking about the gap, the chasm perhaps between the Keys and Havana. Gloria Estefan sang for free for Key Westers on the waterfront of this multicultural little town. One day she will perhaps do the same in Havana.
It occurs to me to think about the possibility of worrying about the reasons for the existence of the sign, but then I relax, I live in the keys after all! What you might call a place that offers savoir faire combined with lassitude, that translates into a quality that outsiders call laid-back, a concept that belongers make fun of as they trudge daily through three jobs that between them barely pay for rent and beer. In Kansas one lives in a small town and doesn't lock one's front door, true, but one frowns and suffers anxiety if a person of strange demeanor enters the city limits. In Key West one possibly locks the door to keep chickens and drunks at arms length, but one hardly notices men dressed as women, people speaking foreign languages on the street or coming to the office in shorts and floral shirts. 
We,as far as I know, have no children on our street, despite the signs of awful warning. Just another of life's little paradoxes in paradise.
I live with a septic tank, underneath a lid like the one shown above, and the county is mulling over how to put me on a central sewer system, at a cost to me of somewhere around $7,000.
The county is preparing next year's budget at a difficult time, especially as the state has mandated budget cuts in all 68 Florida counties. So this is the time the County Administrator, a public clown, decides to fire the Budget Director. On the face of it the Budget Director has been rude and unprofessional to co-workers, including the County Engineer (think sewers) but the BOCC, the Administrator's bosses have split down predictable lines. The majority of three, known as the Gang of Three for their Maoist devotion to cronyism, support the County Clown and the minority of Two, the sensible Republicans (another paradox in paradise!) wonder why the Budget Director is under threat by the Administrator, the jester of the Gang of Three. Which leads me to wonder what is really going on. Is the Budget Director an abrasive yet competent public official, duly worried by the Administrator's ability to run up a huge public deficit- currently $8 million and counting. Or is the Budget Director just another incompetent bubba wallowing in his job, and now facing getting fired because he has fallen out of favor with the rest of the gang?