The Spaghetti Western

 The Spaghetti Western

      Unlike a high school buddy, who devotedly listened to the radio while piddling at homework (yes, we had homework then) and knew every singer and hit, I was more a sing-along mumbler.  Absent homework, I still am as I sit in my little office cubby capturing thoughts.  These days, though, my mumbling has limits.  I find lyrics distracting while trying to write.  Too many lyrics and their words linger in my mind.  Others lose meaning when they overlap with those of a song or echo with a thought.  So, to be honest, I’ve become more a hummer now days, mimicking some tune, sometimes pulsing, sometimes lightly wafting through the room. 

My background music tastes run wide.  Vivaldi, Yo-yo Ma and Sting come to mind, but when it comes to movie scores, two giants dominate my personal taste: German-born Hans Zimmer and Italian composer Ennio Moriccone.  Comparing these two dominant poles of modern cinematic music, I find Zimmer more a cathedral’s architectural engineer, with Morricone, the fresco mystic, painting emotion on its walls.  The difference is dramatic.  Zimmer needs a nuclear reactor’s electric output to accompany a hybrid orchestra and power his sonic architecture of computers, electronics, and rock synthesizers; while Morricone could conjure magic with a handful of instruments and a whisper of melody.  Zimmer stirs me with pounding, martial processions: a Roman legion on the march (The Gladiator) or spearheading a galactic invasion (Dune).  It is difficult to choose between the two, but there’s no need.  You can have both, but when it comes to a vote, the romantic in me bows to Ennio, whose chamber-like music scores add commentary without ever uttering a word.

Even his name feels uniquely ancient.  Unlike Enzo, short for Vincenzo, or a familiar Tony
chipped from Antonio, Ennio, lacking an obvious nickname is absent firm grounding.  His name is

Composer Ennio Morricone

thought to trace to Ennius, an old Roman family name tied to pre‑Roman Samnite languages and the early Roman poet, often called the “father of Roman literature,” Quintus Ennius.  While its exact origin remains obscure, the name is deeply Italic, one that quietly echoes ancient Italy, endowing it with a kind of cultural gravitas.  It’s almost too perfect for the maestro, this giant of a man who reinvented the sound of modern cinema. 

As famous as he became in the wide field of musical composition working as a orchestrator and conductor in the recording field, Morricone lived and worked mostly in Rome and never felt the need to learn English.  Later in his career, even while scoring major international productions, this phenom never cared about his standing in the eyes of Hollywood, nor ever desired to live there.

He was born in 1928.  Like his father, a musician, he learned to play the trumpet.  As a sign of gifted talent, Morricone wrote his first composition when he was six years old.  This was followed by a stint at the Saint Cecilia Conservatory which he’d entered in 1940 at age 12.  Before receiving his diplomas in trumpet, composition, and instrumentation in 1946, Morricone was already active as a trumpet player, often performing in an orchestra that specialized in music written for films. 

    Later, he supported his family by playing jazz gigs, arranging pop songs for the Italian broadcasting service RAI, Italy’s national public broadcasting company.  He also was a ghost writer under various pseudonyms and arranged music for films credited to already well-known composers, in addition to arranging songs for artists ranging from Paul Anka to Andrea 

Director Sergio Leone

Bocelli.  During the 1960s and 1970s, Ennio also participated in an avant-garde ensemble whose experimental sounds would later seep into his film work.

But the hinge of his career pivoted on a childhood friendship with Sergio Leone, a third-grade bond that developed into a lifelong collaboration.  From this alliance emerged a groundbreaking series of so-called Italian Spaghetti Westerns that didn’t just popularize the genre, they transformed cinematic history with Sergio Leone blazing the trail.

In total there were three Leone westerns, referred to as “The Dollars Trilogy.”  Like a cowboy fanning his revolver, they were released in rapid succession:

A Fistful of Dollars (1964, released in the US in 1967 was a remarkable box-office success grossing $14.5 million in the US versus a budget of US$200,000)

For a Few Dollars More (1965, also released in the US in 1967, hauled in US$15 million and indemnified the concept.) 

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966, released in the US in 1967 grossed US$25.1 million)

I find the term Spaghetti Western somewhat derogatory especially when lumped with Meatball or Macaroni Westerns.  Typically B-rated and made on low budgets, the term was coined in obvious

reference to Italian spaghetti and because these Westerns were produced and directed by Italians.  But Italians embrace the era proudly and consider it an important part of Italian cinematic history for it produced international acclaim for its Italian director, Sergio Leone and Italian composer, Ennio Morricone.

By far the most commercially successful was Sergio Leone's seminal film, A Fistful of Dollars.  It resulted in a stylistic earthquake: long silences, sweeping vistas, extreme closeups, black comedy, and violence that felt operatic in its movements.  Morricone’s music didn’t accompany these scenes, it shaped them, for Ennio composed some pieces in advance from reading the script.  Later, they were in Leone’s mind as he filmed the action as the actors essentially moved in tempo of the scored themes.  The result was a kind of cinematic choreography, an opera performed with guns, dust, sweat, and violence.  The result: a distinct genre

Western Style Town Created in Spain
for Good, Bad, and Ugly

had arrived, nothing approaching an American western. 

The result produced a profound impact on the career and musical style of Ennio Morricone.  His music is as legendary as the films themselves.  In many ways, they transformed him from a respected Italian film composer into one of the most influential composers in cinema history. 

And then there was the superglue of Clint Eastwood.  All three films starred this American actor as a mysterious drifter, sometimes bounty hunter, who depicted Sergio Leone's intense vision of the mythical West as a counter hero to the classic American Western.  Eastwood was on break from the TV series Rawhide and nearly turned down the role.  Sergio preferred actor James Coburn but couldn’t afford him, so he hired Clint, yet a nobody, for $15,000. 

 To this point, American Westerns portrayed noble heroes who wore white hats, like Gary Cooper and John Wayne, as purveyors of civilization and justice to the frontier.  Italians, with thousands of years of

The Man with No Name

conquests, wars, and hardship in comparison to our rather brief 250-year glimmer of existence, conceived of the West differently.  Arising from the shards of empires, you’d expect their westerns to reflect a mindset poles apart, which they did.  To them, it was exotic myth, a place where freedom, lawlessness, and survival blurred as a morally ambiguous drifter, Eastwood, “the better of the bad,” eliminated evil without ever donning a white hat.  Rather than copying the American brand, they invented a darker, more violent and cynical focus on the protagonist, who as demented as he may have been in his quest for dollars, was the epitome of justice.  As shocked as American audiences may have been, in the end, however brutal the Italian version of justice was to achieve, it prevailed.  

Long before he evolved into Dirty Harry, “The Dollars Trilogy” transformed Eastwood from a TV series actor into a global icon, renowned as “The Man with No Name.”  To this point he was unknown as a film actor, not yet the cinematic icon he’d become.  The series’ deep and lasting impact launched Eastwood’s movie career and permanently reshaped his persona.  He became a distilled archetype — stoic, ruthless, and word‑sparing, who communicated through stares, silence, and cat‑like movements.  Lacking traditional heroic qualities, he still drove the story, often earning audience sympathy as he betrayed and played villain against villain to become a visual shorthand for a new kind of Western masculinity.  

To accompany this stoic and ruthless “The Man with No Name,” Sergio wanted the score to play an important role; in fact, he famously kept scenes running longer because he didn’t want the music to end, which explains why the films move so slowly (the longest, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” runs approximately three hours long).   Contrary to present day methods, Leone insisted the music play as scenes were being shot which gave an operatic pace to scenes as the actor’s movements gravitated to the rhythm.

      In addition to long sequences, Leone’s 

Trademark Eastwood Wincing Squint 
and Stub of a Cigarillo

direction embraced extreme closeups.  At times they approached still portraits, only as wide as a cowboy hat’s brim, encapsulating the width of two eyes and a sunburned nose.  Leone’s direction and search for perfection (some takes were repeated forty times), lengthy sweeping panoramic vistas, long silences, and unconscionable violence were also influential steppingstones to Clint’s stardom.  To this technique of direction, Morricone's climatic melodies of unusual sounds and instruments toyed with the silent interludes.  Closeups of sweaty faces in a gunfight, one after another, panned across the screen, not only mesmerized audiences but fueled Eastwood’s shifty image as the better of the bad.  The unshaven, sarcastic, insolent Western antihero had his share of distinct trademarks: a wincing squint, a stubby cigarillo cigar, black jeans, his gun and hat from Rawhide, and a sheathing poncho.  Like “rock soup”, bandits, outlaws, ruthless villains, defenseless victims, lovelorn damsels, and merciless brutality, each contributed to the recipe for Italian western sagas unlike anything on the American screen.  Their release in the U.S. ignited a cinematic explosion that didn’t just elevate Eastwood’s career; it created the Clint Eastwood we know today, who sold the American west, like the Marlboro Man sold cigarettes.

It is no fluke that both the “The Man with No Name” and the “Marlboro Man” share DNA.  At their core, both represent a distilled version of American masculinity and individualism.  Both are

The Original Marlboro Man
Colorado Rancher Robert Norris

hyper‑masculine cowboys, selling rugged independence.  While one is a cinematic creation, the other a marketing ploy, there is a kinship between these two paragons of Western idealism.  Like images of the Old West, their dust covered clothes, gritty weather‑beaten complexions, and solitary posture in the saddle, reinforce a nostalgic heroic vision of the American West.  More an American cultural myth, these self‑reliant men have more to say through deportment and expression, than dialogue.  Their uncomplaining images serve as the face of American toughness; the kind of “manly-look” politicians attempt to borrow when they find the need and don plaid flannel shirts and cultivate a five‑o’clock shadow as they walk off with a shotgun. 

For Morricone as well, the series was a recipe served up in heaven.  The films put Morricone's scores firmly on the map.  His innovations in music, coupled with the acting, and storytelling combined as a distinct genre nowhere close to an American western look-alike.  

When budget restrictions limited Morricone's access to a full orchestra, he innovated by harnessing his earlier experimentation with sounds to yield dividends.  He used gunshots, cracking whips, whistles, human voices, Jew’s harps, castanets, trumpets, harmonicas, bells, and Fender electric guitar twangs, even coyote-like howls as substitutes for orchestral arrangements.  His unconventional score for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008, remains one of the most influential film soundtracks ever written. Listen to the Theme and be amazed.

 Some of his other celebrated scores that cemented his legacy include:

Once Upon a Time in the West

The Mission

Cinema Paradiso – There is an effortless Vivaldi-like melody here.  Listen to this Clip that seems to unfurl as in his western themes

The Untouchables 

The Thing – I must add that the 1951 original starring James Arness as “The Thing,” absent   today’s PG guidance, scared the bejeezus out of me as a youngster tagging along with cousins

The Hateful Eight 

In addition to numerous awards, Morricone earned two Oscars including a competitive win at age 87 for Best Original Scored Film in 2016 following an Honorary Academy Award Citation in 2007 for “his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.”  When the maestro died at 91, the result of injuries sustained during a fall, he left behind a prolific musical repertoire of more than 400 films spanning more than seven decades and earned 70 awards.  Yet of all of Ennio’s musical compositions, those with Leone remain his most recognizable achievements.  

Call them what you may, Spaghetti Westerns if you must, but The Dollars Trilogy carved its initials into the bedrock of popular culture.  It was a mythical place where heroes and villains looked alike, where morality was a sliding scale, and where music carried an emotional truth like nothing seen before. 

Sergio Leone, who had earlier in life dropped out of law school, never-the-less made the case for heroes and villains to look alike.  All rarely shaved, were fouler than dirty, and sweated profusely.  Good, bad, or ugly, as the situation demanded, he famously pioneered a character’s gradation of badness until morality became a sloping gradient, sometimes simply the quickness of a draw.

And Morricone made the movies work with narratives, not of words but with larger-than-life crescendos, and haunting melody, that became a film’s bloodstream.  His soundtracks shaped the films, influenced its pacing, and became inseparable from Leone’s fundamental form of storytelling.  He made

A Director's Nightmare -- Spanish Location,
English & Italian Actors

history balancing brutality with beauty and turning murderous insanity into art. 

Its impact was immediate and lasting.  Eastwood’s frugal use of words, content to stare, became recognized worldwide.  Leone’s blend of innovation, relying on visual grammar, its long silences, the operatic pacing, the closeups that felt like portraits, became part of the DNA of modern filmmaking.  Ennio’s scores, sometimes a shorthand for tension, grandeur, or the strange poetry of violence, rewired the expectations of what cinema could be.  In so doing, they created a Wild West that felt far truer than the one I’d inherited.  

Together, each of them, fluent in a different language; image: silence, melody, discovered they could speak in unison to fashion a big screen trilogy of a place where justice limped forward, where survival was a negotiation, and where beauty and brutality shared the same frame.  Their films didn’t ask permission to redefine the Western, they simply did.  

So go ahead, binge them on Netflix or Tubi as I did recently.  If any, the final minutes of the last of the Dollars Trilogy films, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” provide a fitting and unforgettable conclusion, not only to the film itself, but to the Trilogy as a whole.  

Final Epic Standoff Scene from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

In a wordless three-way confrontation amid the stillness of a vast cemetery surrounded by thousands of decrepit crosses, the uneasy alliances and betrayals between three gunslingers culminate in one of cinema's most legendary standoffs.  It is the reimagining of an ancient gladiatorial arena.

Here, the fabric of Sergio Leone’s mastery is on full display.  Its intensity is all there, building with the music.  Time itself seems to stretch as extreme close-ups linger on eyes narrowed with calculation, hands hovering above holsters, and beads of sweat gathering under the relentless sun, as camera long shots and close-ups sweep across the endless circle of stone, dust, and heat.  Verbal dialogue vanishes.  Only the whisper of the wind through the crosses remains as Ennio's “fresco” of a score swells from The Ecstasy of Gold into The Trio, transforming the moment from a simple gunfight into a test of nerve, loyalty, deception, and will.  And audiences, stunned by the audacity, never looked back.

In this dystopic mythology of the Old West, distilled to its purest and most operatic form, three men, one circle, and the hush of silence are so intense that the story seems to hold our breath.  When the gunfire finally breaks its hold, the Dollars Trilogy does not merely end, it achieves immortality.  Breathing once again, I felt its influence grip me.  I’d again witnessed something epic.

From That Rogue Tourist,
Paolo 

For a deeper dive into events behind The Dollars Trilogy, watch the following: “Twenty Movie Secrets” and/or "Interview with Eastwood".

Tanti Auguri (Ton-T Ah-gu-ree)

 Tanti Auguri  (Ton-T Ah-gu-ree)

It wasn’t long ago, only days in fact, that I became an octogenarian, 

which, for the record, is not to be muddled with being an antiquarian.  Though I do enjoy ancient history and have begun to accumulate the respectable patina of age, somehow I’ve reached eighty, a point well beyond the reach of any mid-life crisis.  Yippy, right? 

While reaching eighty is an achievement denied many, I've never been particularly fond of these annual markers.  One of our granddaughters spent more than a year counting down to sixteen.  For her that magical age was when the world hands you a set of car keys, a burgeoning sense of independence, and the first taste of adulthood.  But the odometer of life spins only one way, and eventually notable milestones like these are no more.

Birthdays are funny rituals.  Their meaning quietly changes while pretending not to.  When we’re young, each birthday feels like rocket fuel.  Each year launches us toward some new privilege: crossing the street alone, staying up later, voting.  Everything points toward an event horizon promising more.  Somewhere before I reached 80, questions began tapping me on the shoulder: What's all the excitement about now?  Why keep counting? 

     Pathetic?  Not really.  Just as I’ve changed with age, the significance of birthdays has evolved right along with me.  Around midlife, their tenor shifted.  The cake, candles and off-key singing remain, but now birthdays come with a side of self-examination.  People have long since stop asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?  Instead, birthdays begin to resemble annual performance reviews.  Questions creep in: “Am I where I hoped I’d be?”  “Why does my back hurt when I haven’t done anything in days?”  And like the

Why Bother with Cake?

chiropractic procedure we may need, birthdays begin to measure the alignment between the life you imagined and the life you’re actually living. 

By seventy or eighty, birthdays molt again.  To this point, age may once have been a secret, but why bother hiding it now, it’s just a number.  The blush left the rose long ago to become, with time, spots on my hands.  Celebrations shift from becoming and achieving to simply continuing.  Lighting candles becomes a soothing declaration that you’re still there.  By this point, a birthday is no longer a milestone.  It’s a victory lap, like the winner of the Indy 500 takes to the cheers of the crowd.  By then, compliments arrive with their own sly subtext: "You look great!" or "You don't look anywhere near eighty!"  At the same time, both statements manage to praise you while reminding you just how old you are. 

But survival is one of life's most underrated triumphs.  It means you’ve outlasted fads, crises, several generations of slang, and more computer apps than you care to admit make absolutely no sense without the assistance of a grandchild.  You’ve lived long enough

to watch the world reinvent itself in ways your younger self couldn’t have imagined.  The truth is rather simplistic: we don’t celebrate birthdays because we have an unlimited supply.  We celebrate them because we don’t.  

America may set trends, but is not known for its relaxed, slow pace.  Our race to achieve often outstrips our sense of community.  Italy, on the other hand, seems to have gotten the memo that family outranks frenzy.  Their birthday customs make this clear. 

The Italian approach is warmer, more communal, more food‑centered, and less self‑celebratory.  For Italians, birthdays matter, but they matter as a family-and-friends occasion, not as ego milestones.  Extravagant parties are uncommon; there are no grand productions, no day-long entitlement.  It is a day less about “me” and more about “us.”

    Best wishes arrive in the form of ubiquitous greetings: “Tanti Auguri!” (sung to the tune of “Happy Birthday to You” as in the US) or “Buon Compleanno” (completion of a year)!  They’re not only spoken but repeatedly texted and emailed non-stop with the enthusiasm of a national sport. 

In traditional Italian culture, only one other annual celebration outshines a birthday.  While birthdays matter, they don’t carry the same historical or communal weight as the onomastico (name day).  Historically tied to the feast of the saint you’re named after, it once carried far more weight than a birthday, which the Church viewed as a pagan indulgence.  Modern Italians celebrate both, but the onomastico still holds deeper cultural roots.

We got an inkling of these striking cultural differences many years ago on the occasion of a friend’s birthday in Calitri.  We wished her happy birthday and invited her across the street to a café for the three ‘C’s’: coffee, conversation, and a cornetto.  Little did we know that in Italy, the birthday person is the host, not the guest.

In the U.S., friends might buy you dinner or at least a drink.  In Italy, birthday role reversal continues, for if you invite people out for your birthday, it goes without saying that you will be paying the bill.  At work, you bring the pastries.  It’s a gesture of gratitude for the relationships in your life.¹

Italians bring gifts to celebrate the birthday person, but don’t waste time hunting for the perfect card.  Cards aren’t needed even if you are lucky enough to find one.  We still laugh about the time Maria Elena fell victim to cultural unfamiliarity when she tried to buy a sympathy card.  The shopkeeper listened politely as Maria Elena explained what she wanted and its purpose, but to no avail.  They had no such thing.  A blank, folded note card was as close as it got.  Instead of sending sympathy cards, Italians prefer to attend the funeral, speak face‑to‑face, and console grieving family members directly, a tradition that feels both ancient and deeply caring.

Another cultural misstep comes to mind.  It happened following the purchase of beautifully potted Chrysanthemums for an Italian friend.  When we presented them she burst into laughter.  Chrysanthemums are for the dead on All Souls’ Day, which was approaching.  We were embarrassed but soon joined in the laughter.  Like our birthday café invitation, here was another gaffe in Italian cultural norms.  No doubt, there will be more.

As for the cake, the person celebrating their birthday will be the person who either makes it or buys one from a Pasticceria.²  The birthday celebrant traditionally enjoys the first slice.  Much like us, the celebrant makes a wish and blows out the candles hoping, in keeping with a universal superstition, that if all are extinguished in one breath, their wish will be granted .¹

But birthdays, in the grand scheme, extend far beyond the people gathered around us. Each  

DNA Double Helix

birthday is also a reminder of the humanity we carry within us: the thousands of ancestors, stolen by time, whose traits, quirks, and stubborn streaks we possess.  When that last birthday inevitably arrives and we pass, we are remembered by those we leave behind.  However, there is a further passing that occurs when those who knew us also pass into the annals of time.  Memories become further diluted and it goes on and on.  It is only fitting in our birthday enthusiasm to recall the long line of extended family that preceded us, those ancestors well before “great” and “great-great” appear in our family declension.  The past is never gone, just hiding inside us.

For centuries, heredity was a mystery.  Today science is cracking this enigma.  I tapped into these advances through a DNA test that provided a glimpse into the chromosomes I inherited from millennia of ancestors.  Far removed from bordering on expertise when it comes to the entwining of our makeup, I rely on a simplistic analogy:

•      The DNA double helix, always the same, is the font and paper of a book.
•      The chromosomes are the chapters (23 chapters from each parent).
•       My 'story’ (traits) depends on the words (DNA sequences) inside those chapters (in the above photo they are the T, C, G, or a four-letter alphabet on the ladder-like rungs which differ from person to person).  Like computer code, millions of these unique arrangements form the message which determine the traits I possess.  

It is staggering to contemplate but think of DNA as a ladder with millions of rungs, packed so tightly that six feet of it fits inside a cell nucleus far smaller than a speck of dust, pass to me some of the traits, even behaviors.  We are indeed remarkable beings of extraordinarily complex design.

Years ago, I was disappointed with the results of a glimpse into

Grandfather Domenico

my long-in-development pedigree.  I wrote at the time how shocked I was to learn I was only 11% Italian.  Recently, however, that number changed dramatically.  Had they felt my irritation?  Not according to the preamble which explained that technology had improved and databases had expanded.  Maps, names of unknown relatives and more emerged.  Their list of my physical characteristics was much more accurate: I was recast as blue eyed, fair skinned, and with little chance of freckles, baldness, or a hairy back.  All true.

Much like a fine blended wine, it appears that my DNA maturation is 99.8% European.  Forty-five percent of me was contributed by my Italian ancestors on my dad’s side, who originated in the Lombardy region from a mix of ancient Ligurian, Etruscan, Celtic, and Roman populations.  I’d love to claim descent from some Roman centurion, why not Caesar himself!  But wars, lost records, the loss of family lineage preserved in family bibles, and the fading of memory has long erased those details.  My grandmother on my father’s side, Adelina, originated from an eastern Lombardy town near

Adelina's Italian Hometown

Lake Garda.  My grandfather, Domenico, hailed from the opposite side of Lombardy, from the Italian lakes’ region, close enough to Lake Lugano that another few kilometers and I might have developed an inexplicable fondness for Swiss cheese.  Given that I now live beside a lake, it seems lakes run in the family as surely as DNA. 

How my grandparents arrived in the U.S. I know, but why they came remains a mystery.  Neither did I ever learn how they originally managed to close the 200 km gap between them.  While they ran out of birthdays many years past and I can’t ask them, I did inherit the breath of a hint from the April 1906 ship’s manifest they arrived on.  With them on their arrival at Ellis Island was my baby uncle, Antonio, born in 1903 and at the time two and a half years old. 

Grandmother Adelina (Lt)

I noticed they had married in February 1906, just before departing Italy.  In a small Italian town in 1906, gossip traveled faster than broadband ever would.  News didn't go viral; it simply walked out the front door and arrived everywhere at once.  I suspect Uncle Pete’s pre-nuptial birthday may have encouraged their departure for a new start in the U.S.  For that I remain forever thankful. 

My French DNA from my mother, tips the scale at 45.3% and descends from a blend of Gauls Roman settlers, and later Frankish populations.  The earliest known chromosome doner on my mother’s side was Marie Labrecque, born in Paris in 1435.  From there, a part of me migrated to Normandy, Brittany and Loire, before sailing to Canada in the 1600s.  One Canadian ancestor, Marie Michel born in Quebec in 1660, married Chief Martin Kaorate Taouabanoun, a historical figure in Quebec.  Admittedly, it has been some time, but I estimate that a drop or two of native Algonquin sangue (blood)

Canadian Grandparents

remains in me.  It may perhaps explain my occasional bouts of righteous indignation (a hereditary trait perhaps?), or as my ancestor might have put it, “going on the warpath.”  

I doubt that my Indian heritage celebrated birthdays especially in small tribal units.  Months were not part of their culture.  Absent a work-a-day, seven-day cycle, phases of the moon, community rites of passage like manhood, and seasonal events were good enough.

To allow everyone else to pile onto this DNA scrum, my remaining 10% is a blurred blend of Norwegian, British, Spanish, Portuguese, to name a few.  Apparently, my DNA development moved about in many directions, with occasional stopovers, resulting in packets of concentration along the way.  Clearly a combination of decisions made, sidestepped, or forced by circumstances outside my ancestor’s control played a hand and likely attributed to their success, eventually seeing them gradually make their way to France and Italy.  Though their voices have grown silent, hundreds left their fingerprints on my makeup.  Whether everyday Joes or Sallys, I'd love to know every one of their stories, from mundane to spectacular, especially of those French and Italian ancestors who dared cross the Atlantic.  Moving backward from limb, to trunk, to the very roots of my family tree, united in common DNA, we remain connected, and worthy of celebration in each and every birthday.  

    For each birthday we celebrate rests upon thousands we never witnessed: those marked by phases of the moon, church bells, by harvests, candles, chants, cakes, gifts, and calendars now long dissolved to dust.  Behind every one of us stands a long line of ancestors whose names have slipped away, but whose lives still pulse quietly in our own.

I've often told my children and grandchildren, "Remember who you are and what you represent."  The older I get, the more I realize how much is encompassed in those words.  None of us stands alone.  We are the accumulated hopes, risks, journeys, sacrifices, and lucky breaks of countless people who never imagined how their stories would ripple forward.  

So here on this my eightieth birthday, in true Italian fashion, the celebration isn't entirely about me.  It's also for the multitudes who handed down a fragment of themselves and then vanished into the long corridors of antiquity.  To all of them, from Lombardy to Paris, from Quebec to places whose names no map remembers: Tanti auguri for carrying the story far enough for me to add my chapter, and for making these eighty birthdays possible.

From the Rogue Tourist,
Paolo

1. Celebrating Birthdays in Italy: Traditions and Customs, 

https://holidaypaths.com/birthday/italian-birthday-traditions

2. Unveiling Italy's Most Fascinating Birthday Traditions You Never Knew, https://holidaypaths.com/birthday/italian-birthday-traditions