(Everything Happens) For a Reason

I am a strong believer that fate exists. That everything happens for a reason. That the people we have in our lives are in our lives without accident. There is always meaning. Explainable or unexplainable.
~Juansen Dizon

As I mentioned in my last post, there were a number of ways I could start a post about why we ended up in Pescara instead of Treviso this week. To make a long story short in case you did not read that last post, one of the reasons was because my first group had to postpone their trip to Italy due to emergency health concerns. Because of that, my schedule opened up some time I did not have before. That was, as I mentioned, only part of the reason.

The Second Back Story

The February morning Mike and I left the US, I received the following email:

I’m Davide Scorrano from Moscufo (Italy). I’m 22 years old. I’ve just read your article about your grandmother Maria Liberata Crugnale. I’m looking for informations on the Crugnale family. My great-great-grandmother was Teresa Crugnale. She was born in 1880 in Pettorano sul Gizio (Italy). Her parents were Antonio Crugnale and Margherita Ventresca. Thanks to Family Search and MyHeritage I’m finding out that maybe she had siblings, including a sister with the same name as your grandmother….

There was a lot more to the email, but suffice to say, Davide wanted to know if we were, perhaps, related. He wanted, also, to know if I knew anything else about his great-great-grandmother and the Crugnale family.

If you know me at all, you know how excited I was to get this email from Davide. Because my grandmother came from a larger family that spread throughout the eastern US, we did not have contact with all of them a lot. I knew Zia Teresa (Aunt Teresa) lived in Italy, but I didn’t know much more than that and a few other supposed facts my mother and grandmother told me.

I wrote back to Davide, and I told him that we were, indeed, cousins and that I would tell him what I knew of the family. In addition, I mentioned being in Italy until June and hoped that we could possibly meet. Davide replied that he hoped I could meet them, too.

Blockades

Moscufo, where Davide and his family live, is near Pescara. Since Mike and I were staying in Lucca, getting to Pescara would be difficult. The train ride would take six-to-ten hours each way. We discussed possibly taking the train from Bologna once we were there since it was only a four-hour ride, but I still didn’t want to spend all that time on a train.

“I guess,” I told Mike, “I can go in September when I get back.” We allowed that that was probably a good idea, but Mike was really interested in meeting them, too. “Let me think a bit,” I replied. “We have over a month to decide.

The Best-laid Plans…

Davide and I continued to email each other with family information. I wondered how Zia Teresa ended up in Moscufo since she was Pettoranesa, and Davide supplied the answers. I explained the family dynamics on the American side and sent him the photos that I had of the Crugnale siblings. He sent me photos of Zia Teresa’s family, and a few of the people I knew (barely) because they had lived in Steubenville and visited Gram when I was a child.

It was during my conversations with Davide that everything I had planned for the spring took a hard right turn. With the April group’s postponement, my schedule opened up, as I said. “Do you think we could maybe go to Pescara instead of Treviso?” I asked Mike.

“We have to go to Pescara,” Mike answered.

Of course we did.

Pescara to Moscufo

So, last Tuesday, we left Bologna and headed to Pescara for a few days. Davide, with no help from me, arranged a visit for us to Moscufo on Saturday (April 18). He and his mom, Lidia, picked Mike and me up in Pescara and took us to the town where my great-aunt settled after her return to Italy in 1911. While Moscufo is in the same region as Pettorano (Abruzzo), it is some distance from Zia’s hometown and in a different province (Pescara instead of L’Aquila).

With about 3100 inhabitants, Moscufo is a typical Abruzzese hilltop town. Dense olive groves fill the hills, making it part of the “triangolo d’oro (triangle of gold),” an area known for the best olive oil production in Abruzzo.

My new-found cousins took us to see the churches where Teresa worshipped, the house where she lived, and the land that she cultivated. I was able to pray at her grave (cover photo), stand in the kitchen where she cooked, and see the view of the land she loved. My cousins arranged for Domenico, president of the pro loco, to give us information on the history of the town and the churches.

I won’t bore you with what I found out during my conversations with Davide and during our visit yesterday. Suffice to say I have discovered a lot of interesting new information as well as confirmation of what I remember hearing from my mother and grandmother. Since it will be in my book, it will eventually come out.

The best part of the day was meeting family. In addition to Davide and Lidia, we met Maria, Lidia’s mother who was married to Mario, Aunt Teresa’s grandson. We also met Enrico, Lidia’s husband, and Mario, a second cousin. Maria and Lidia cooked a wonderful lunch, and we talked and laughed about family and life. We compared photos of family and agreed that we Crugnale have a certain face shape. “You can’t deny blood,” Lidia said.

You certainly cannot.