(used by permission)

Shortly after ten o'clock we finish packing the Kangoo and start off down the bumpy road. At Agnese's I get out to hand over the keys. She seems unsurprised. "La casa e' molto isolata," she says kindly, and I say it's a beautiful house, but yes, isolated, and the girls haven't been feeling well. She is sorry to hear that, tells me about her own daughter - who died after a motorcycle crash, age 16 - and her husband, who died from cancer a few years back. She says there is no feeling on earth worse than the feeling of worrying about your children's health. "But I have serenity," she says. And it seems to me that she does.

We head south. One last drive through Contigliano, one last trip across the pretty plain and through the outskirts of Rieti. This time, as if the curse has been lifted, we find the road we are looking for - toward a place called Avezzano - without any trouble, and begin the scenic drive down Italy's spine, with the snowy four, five, and seven-thousand-foot mountains for company. Somewhere in the first part of that drive I say to Amanda, "I'm feeling a little flu-ish."

"Me, too," she says. "My stomach isn't right. Maybe it was the eggs Agnese gave us."

"Maybe."

As far as Avezzano on State Highway 578 we encounter no problems, though I'm feeling worse by the mile and stop twice, the first time for a breath of fresh air, and the second for a dose of ibuprofen. In the back seat, my mother is teaching Alexandra a card game called "Snap!" I do not know how this game is played, I know only that when someone puts down a certain card she has to yell out SNAP! At top volume and slap the back of her grandmother's hand. I had three hours of sleep last night. With each beautiful, mountainous mile it is becoming clearer that what I am feeling has nothing to do with Agnese's fresh eggs - which Amanda scrambled for breakfast. No, the bitter truth is that I am sinking into the influenzal muck Juliana is just climbing out of. I remember that I had a bad visit to the bathroom that morning as we were packing up. I remember that, on our first evening in the house we mistakenly took our drinking water right from the faucet and only later found out it wasn't potable. SNAP! The road winds. SNAP! Juliana stirs, coughs in a way I don't like. Amanda takes off her seatbelt and turns around to look at her, but she goes back to sleep.

"Lunch, coming up!" I say, through the miserable fog of my illness. The cheerful dad. Lunch, coming up.

"Yay! Lunch!"

"There has to be a restaurant in that town," I say. "We must have missed it. People there have to eat."

I let the carabinieri behind us go past, then, once the police car is out of sight, make a U-turn on the tight road. We glide back down the hill into Testa del Abruzzo. A man is working in his garage there, cutting wood, door open. I stop and ask about restaurants qui vicino, half expecting him to look at the children, at my mother, ask us where we're from and then invite us upstairs for home-cooked pasta. But that's a scene from another dream. "There's a restaurant just around this next corner," he says, unsmiling, all business, focused on the boards at hand. "But no place to leave your car."

"Can we leave it here?" I ask him.

He pauses half a beat and says, "No."

So we go around the hairpin corner again, and see, just where the amicable wood-cutter said they would be, signs for a trattoria. And, just as he said, there is no place to park anywhere in the vicinity. We drive slowly on. Half a mile further down the road is a bar with a three-car parking area in front and some disaffected youth hanging out there on the stone steps of a stone church. "Why are they smoking, Dad?" Alexandra wants to know.

I think: Because there is no hope of eating.

The bad stretches are as unnerving as the good stretches are exhilarating; for the past few days now I've been thinking about this, a bruised, scratched-up man standing waist-deep in heavy surf watching the next enormous wave roll in. I ask the woman behind the little bar in Testa del Abruzzo what the other options for lunch might be, and she tells us about a restaurant, half a mile back, at the corner.

"But no place to park," I say.

"Right."

"Could we leave our car out front, here, and walk?"

"The police will come by," she says. "Give you a ticket."

"How much would the ticket be?"

"Sixty Euros," she says, and it is testimony to the state of my health mental and physical - that I stand there for a few seconds wonderingwhether or not it is worth it. Sixty Euros, seventy bucks, let's see. . . .

Outside, the disaffected youth are focusing all their intermittent and wandering attention upon us, this naive-looking family of five with a fully-packed car. My laptop rests conspicuously in the back window of the Kangoo. Golf clubs beside it. Altogether it is a few thousand dollars' worth of merchandise, enough to keep them in cigarettes and nose rings for years.

"Let's drive on," I say. "There's bound to be a restaurant along the highway."

No one objects, so we load ourselves back into the car-Ma in the middle, the girls to either side, well strapped in, Amanda beneath a pile of maps, crackers, sippy-cups, notepads, plastic earrings, crayons and tissues in the passenger seat. Me behind the wheel. We wind away through the Abruzzan hills, this cold, rugged terrain to which so many Italian American families can trace their roots. A hundred years ago, before the wars, before Mussolini, before a complicated amalgam of foreign aid and social, political, and economic changes brought southern Italy into the modern world, the mountain towns of Abruzzo offered little or nothing in the way of upward mobility. Poor, bleak, disease-ridden, presided over by corrupt officials and choked by a rigid caste system, this land was the perfect breeding ground for a dream pronounced "America."

Italian American Farm Workers

What strong, smart, ambitious young man or woman, hearing the claims of gold and milk and honey, dreaming dreams of freedom and equality, would not have been tempted to pack up a few belongings, ride a horse-drawn cart to Naples, and book passage for the land of opportunity? It occurs to me that I am the inheritor of those kinds of inflated dreams, only in reverse. It's not gold I think about when I think about this land across the ocean, but warmth, unadulterated food, beautiful churches and sublime works of art, a slow-paced, family-oriented way of living. It's not property and kin I've abandoned in search of those dreams, only a cold house and a stack of bills, but there is a link, I can feel it. Some kind of genetic predisposition to the pursuit of something better, for my family, and for me.

It can work out well, that kind of ambition, that urge for a real meal - instead of candy bars - for the kids, a warm house instead of a cold one. It can work out well. And it can also lead you south, along a winding highway, into a deep swamp of trouble.

(To be continued in next month's newsletter)