Remembering our ancestors, just a stone’s throw from the mighty oxen
In the hamlet of Cattabiano, houses and generations follow one another. In the memory of a poet and writer, the changes recorded in the land registry mingle with those of the heart and mind
On the 1887 cadastral map, the hamlet of Cattabiano – situated halfway up the hillside, where the bed of the Parma stream is still wide enough to resemble a river, before it climbs towards Corniglio, gradually narrowing and changing in shape and character – does not look very different from how it is today: a tiny little square, one side of which is entirely taken up by the large old house belonging to the R. family, whilst the other side is lined with a few small houses leaning against one another, as if to support each other so as not to fall over.
All around, on every side, the R. estate stretches out, with its vast fields and neatly laid-out woods. The small square and the houses surrounding it seem to be the only places suited to the lives of men and women, landowners and sharecroppers. Beyond the ‘real world’ of the houses lies the Kingdom of Nature, where humans are merely guests.
Everything seems just as it is now. But if I look more closely at the stark, precise outline – devoid of imagination – I realise that this is not the case, nor could it ever be. Even here in Cattabiano, where everything seems the same year after year, generation after generation, nothing has remained as it was in 1887, the year of the birth of Antonio R., the eldest son of Sesto and Countess Teresa Cavatorta della Valle di Castrignano, designated heir to the family’s estates and lands, forty-three years before his death.
The details on the map are both revealing and disappointing. Many features no longer correspond: the current layout of the manor house with its small outbuildings; the stable that closes off the farmyard towards the Fossa di Rì; the routes of the cart tracks leading to the main meadows – the Madone, the Canapaio, the Vigna Vecchia and the Piana del Massone; the village’s main road, altered in 1920 to facilitate access to the village. And then there is the building overlooking the small square known as Pellegrone, a massive early sixteenth-century stone structure with small windows and a broad roof of flat slate slabs. It was dismantled immediately after the last war to make way for the new church, which was more convenient for the R. family than the late seventeenth-century one—certainly modest, albeit with its own elegant simplicity, but deemed, without appeal, to be too far from the village and therefore expendable. Maria, the young widow of Antonio R., wanted to pray close to home, in comfort; for this reason, she had donated the Pellegrone, with its surrounding woodland—where a monumental oak tree at least three centuries old stood—to the Curia, so that the new ‘house of Our Lord’ might be built there. Thus, perhaps without realising it, for the sake of convenience Maria had decreed, along with the end of that memorable plan, the abandonment of that ancient little church, which, amongst other things, had also had the merit of preserving a late medieval watchtower, transforming it into a bell tower. The convenience of prayer sometimes entails harsh sacrifices, evidently.
I look at the map and find myself wanting to see more. Being used to Google Maps’ Street View mode has got me accustomed to an exploration full of surprises – even if virtual – and suited to the imagination – even if unrealistic – and I feel a sort of growing disappointment as I move from one point to another on the canvas-backed sheet of paper, from one meadow to the next along the route of the cart tracks. I’d like to see, back in 1887…
