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CHAPTER FIFTH

- When children didn't dream of Disneyland -

Anyone that grew up in a small village certainly has a keen memory of the smells. These were the vivid smells of different grasses, flowers, vegetables, fruits, insects, running water, wet soil, leaves. Each of these smells had a distinct fragrance easily identifiable. There were also the stenches of manure, urine, dirt, human and animal body odors. These smells often combined in unison that resembled an olfactory symphony.

What were the daily activities of children in Fallo? In a small village like Fallo there was nothing to entertain children in my days: television did not exist, there were only a few radios, there was no cinema, no clubs, nothing. The girls after school usually stayed home or played in front of or near the house. They played with rag dolls, with broken dishes, stone pebbles. The boys had more freedom. The boys went to school, did the little homework assigned and then they were free. Some may have done a few chores. The rest of the time we played and discovered the world around us. First, there were many seasonal games. In good weather we played soccer on Colle Rosso for hours. We played bocce, when the wooden ones were unavailable we made them by rounding stones. We played hide and seek through the village

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during the day and in the evenings as well.
In the summer during the wheat harvest we tried to ski with canes on patches of dried hay. We went to swim in the river in two or three locations chosen because of their size or depth. We also tried to catch the scarce fish in the Sangro river with wicker traps, the "nass" (from the Latin word nassa, fish trap).
As children we spent hours watching the few artisans at work in the village. We would watch the carpenter work occasionally in his shop. I clearly remember how he would make boards from a trunk which had been carefully cured. He did all this with hand tools. He would then carefully plane the boards, and glue them to form large boards to make furniture. He sharpened his tools on a foot driven stone wheel on which water dripped from a punctured tin can attached above it. He did all the carvings and decoration with hand chisels.

We watched the blacksmith (one of them, Ciro Di Gironimo, was my fathers'uncle) at work. The lucky ones among us were asked to pedal the forge bellow. The blacksmith would shape different tools from red hot iron rods which he struck on the anvil with a huge hammer. Many of