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My wife Carmela and I recently visited Fallo (September 27-October 1, 1994). For both of us it was somewhat of a sentimental journey. The forty six years of absence had created a painful gap for me. My wife, born in Boston, was eager to visit the village where her parents were born and of which she had heard so much all her life. A visit of four days, or a longer one for that matter, could never have reconciled the Fallo I knew, nor the Fallo my wife had created in her mind, with the one we found. I had no illusion of finding things unchanged, in fact I was well aware of the changes, happenings and deaths. The American Fallesi, my parents included, frequently visited Italy or were in contact with their relatives there. I had even seen pictures and videos of the village which showed the many changes. I had news from Fallo even from my mother's last visit there in 1989.

As I arrived in Fallo at the old "bivio", now an incongruous rotary, I continued driving toward the village with the same trepidation and anticipation that I used to feel every time I returned there after a long absence. The road seemed a little smaller, some of the road turns had been straightened. The new soccer field looked abandoned. The unfinished hotel appeared like a building without luster, almost out of place. And so I drove toward the village and the people.

 
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The next morning, very early, I began to walk through the whole village, especially to the places to which so much of my youth had belonged. I was soon saddened to see the changes in the streets and houses in which I had lived. Many of the houses had been abandoned, many others were unoccupied because of the season, the streets were deserted, there was a prevailing feeling of emptiness. Many of the structures in one section of the village resembled old ruins, not so much because of their physical appearance, which in fact looked almost the same as they did when I grew up there, but because of the silence which seemed to penetrate them. The bee garden where I spent so much time with my aunt Bambina, still had the huge fig tree and the rosemary hedge, but gone were the rose bushes, the neat isles where we kept the beehives, the flower beds, and the vegetable patches. Weeds had overrun most of it, even the stone steps. The new owner had built a few dog houses with boards nailed askew and patches of wire fence, and an ugly chicken coop in another section, which offended even more this garden that once had been so beautiful.

The outside of my father and aunt Bambina's houses seemed older and more gray. Only the wooden door and the grated window had retained their old identity. On the other side of the house two ugly television antennas had been attached to the balconies.

My maternal grandparents' house had still a nice external appearance