A Quiet Welcome

As the car approached the sign at the town line, there was some new construction – houses and apartments – that told me Frosolone is not the deserted town I sometimes imagined. I knew it didn’t look like this a hundred years ago or more when the La Postas and other Frosolonesi left, but it wasn’t long before we pulled into the center of town, and found the kind of buildings I had imagined – made of ancient, solid stone, along narrow winding alleys lined with cobblestones.

It was after two o’clock in the afternoon, and, like most of Italy, the stores on the wide main street were closed and the town was quiet. Franco Tartaglia’s bar was open, and inside, Giuseppe Prezioso and a few friends were watching a soccer game on the bar’s tv. Capparela explained why we were there, and immediately they sent someone to bring “the Professor” back to the bar. The Professor, Michele Fazioli, had studied in Rome and has an excellent command of the English language. It turned out that he also runs a hotel in Frosolone owned by Ernesto Fazioli, and of course we agreed to stay there for the night, settling one of the most unsettling questions a traveler without reservations can have in an unfamiliar town in a foreign country.

I knew from some internet research that there had been a Giovanni La Posta who was a scissors maker in Frosolone, and the Professor led us to the building where my ancestor’s home and shop had been. Giovanni had a daughter, who had daughters, and they all moved to other parts of Italy, Michele explained. I was disappointed that no La Postas remained in town. The former La Posta house had been purchased recently and remodeled, complete with a new facade, and we posed for pictures in front of it.

Next, he led us to the monument in the center of town, for more pictures. It’s a memorial to the townspeople who gave the ultimate sacrifice in both world wars, and I read family names that are still known in my hometown of Troy, NY – Caruso, Colaneri, Colarusso, Colavecchio, De Maria, Di Blasio, Fazioli, LaPosta, Mangione, Paolucci, Zampini and more.

While Michele was walking us to the shop of Rocco Petrunti, Frosolone’s forbiciaio (scissors-maker), Nicola Zampini happened to walk by. Michele introduced him to us as the director of Frosolone’s Museo Ferri Taglienti – literally, “museum of cutting irons.” While we went into the Petrunti shop, Michele had a conversation outside with the museum director. He had an idea.

Inside the shop, showing us a dazzling display of razors, knives and scissors made by Rocco, was his father, a man of a certain age, Domenico Petrunti. With Rich’s help, we made each other understood. I wanted to buy a few items stamped with the name of the town, and Domenico went into the back to summon Rocco’s wife, who spoke English. A woman of Asian background with the bi-cultural name of Ching Petrunti appeared, and we had a pleasant conversation as I chose a few pairs of beautiful heron-shaped embroidery scissors with some gold plating for relatives, and pair of barber shears for myself. It wasn’t easy to decide – Petrunti’s range of products is impressive, and his entire catalog can be seen on his website.

Since I was traveling with only carry-on luggage, it would have been impossible to get the scissors through customs on an international flight, so we arranged for them to be shipped to my home. While taking down my name and address, Ching said, “We have a minister named Visco.” Thinking I had made another connection in Frosolone, this time on my father’s side, I asked what denomination, thinking she was referring to a clergyman. She corrected me – “No – he’s Italy’s Minister of Finance.” I planned on researching that when I got home – if I had a relative in high places in Italy, I might be persuaded to make yet another genealogical trip. I did check, and there he was: Vincenzo Visco, Minister of the Treasury, Budget and Economic Planning of Italy. I’ve dropped him a line with some of my family’s background and am waiting to see if we’re related. (What with recent economic news, I fear he may be in hiding.)

We finished our transaction at Petrunti’s shop, which resulted in the cost for shipping the four scissors actually exceeding the purchase price. As we stepped out of the store, there was the Professor with Nicola Zampini, who eagerly offered to open the museum for us, and give us a personal tour of the artifacts there.

Next time: Are LaPosta scissors on view?

Pompeii to Frosolone

The next day was the perfect day to spend among the ruins. The weather improved considerably, and with excellent advice from the desk clerk of our hotel, the Amleto, which is a few steps from one of the entrances to the ruins, we took the tourist bus – for one euro each – to the farthest entrance of the ruins, and walked through, ending up near the hotel. A wise move.

As I posed with Vesuvius in the background, we learned about the the ancient city, which is still only two-thirds uncovered. It held a population of twenty thousand, about 10 per cent of whom were victims of the eruption and the subsequent burial of the city.

Pompeii was a prosperous, seaside town, and if you get there early enough, as we did, before dense packs of tourists arrive, shuffling behind tour guides with various colored flags, you can imagine yourself back in time, walking up to and in some cases into homes, taverns, laundries, bakeries and brothels, astonished at the preservation of the rich color of the murals, altars, decorations and political graffiti. The weather during our day there was almost too warm – in the 70's by midday, and we were exhausted by the time we were through, having spent a full five hours seeing everything that was to be seen, including ingenious plaster casts of some of the victims, preserved in repose for all time.

When we exited near the hotel, the desk clerk’s advice was greatly appreciated by two weary, wide-eyed tourists, who ended the afternoon sitting in the plaza near the hotel enjoying double gelati and the parade of modern Pompeians.

As for accommodations and meals in the present day city of Pompei, we were lucky to have had recommendations from a friend of Rich’s, who had recently spent several weeks there, working on a soon-to-be-seen documentary on the villa at Oplontis. We were also told of two fine restaurants in Pompei that we wisely sought out – not cheap, but worth the 50 or 60 euros at each sitting – La Situla and Presidente.

Invariably, when we showed up at any Italian restaurant for dinner at seven, we were greeted by the sight of the staff having dinner. Italians don’t begin their evening meal until eight. So, by the time we were finished with our three or four courses, the restaurant would be filled with patrons who were at the beginning of either their antipasti or primi.

The Amleto Hotel’s amenities were outstanding – what they term a “rich” breakfast was spread out every morning – rolls and breads for toasting, yogurt, cereals, fresh fruit, juices and filled pastries, all self-service, and a tended coffee bar – included in the reasonable off-season room rates.

The first night, we shared a room with separate beds, but my snoring proved intolerable, and so for the next two nights, the clerks graciously offered us two individual rooms for not much more than the price of the double – and even at that lowered rate, one of us got to stay in the original room, which, by the way, had a refrigerator, mini-bar and heated towel rack. In the lobby was a computer and printer with free access to the internet, which came in handy for keeping in touch with friends and family back home, as well as printing out maps for our foray into the Apennines to the east to visit Frosolone on our last vacation day.

Our desk clerks even arranged for a car rental company to deliver our car to the hotel, and the company accepted a facsimile of Rich’s driver’s license, since his had been stolen within minutes of our arrival in Rome. He’s normally a very cautious traveler – all he did was lose that necessary focus on security for a brief time on the Roma metrebus, but that’s all it takes.

So, we left the hotel at nine a.m. on Friday for what was supposed to be a two and a half hour drive out of Pompei and up into the mountains to Frosolone. It took us just about twice that long. I’m tempted to claim that our getting lost was the fault of the maps, but I have to take the blame and admit that I’m a terrible navigator. Rich generously offered to do all the driving, and when we got lost on the wrong mountain with some of the most breathtaking and heart-stopping turns, I was as glad he was driving as I was sorry I was riding in that little Fiat on those wet roads.

Incidentally, as small as the car was, it took 40 euros (about $52 US at the exchange rate then) to fill the tank, which was practically bone dry when it was delivered. But gas mileage in European cars averages 43 miles per gallon, and even with our extra couple of hours of driving, we returned the car with about a half a tankful of diesel fuel – and asked for and received credit for it, making the actual rental fee for one day 65 instead of 85 euros.

After stopping several times and trying to tell people it was Frosolone and not Frosinone we were looking for, we finally arrived at a sign that pointed the way to our destination. When we first spotted the town in the distance, we were coming up around a bend through some somber clouds – so the sight of the sun shining on the stone houses with red roofs surrounded by rolling fields and rutted farm roads was a welcome medieval landscape.

Next -- where is everybody?

Off to Italy

It’s 27 years after my first spur-of-the-moment cross-country trip with LA classical DJ Rich Capparela, and once again, he’s complaining to me about traveling alone, this time to Europe. It’s late in my career, I’m now semi-retired and working in an Albany advertising agency just two days a week, for a friend who’s flexible about my hours, and she encouraged me to say to Rich, as I did back in 1980, “I can go with you.”

Capparela and his wife had taken two trips to Italy before, the most recent a cruise with land excursions along Italy’s west coast. He had especially enjoyed Rome and a brief tour of part of the ruins of Pompei, and because he was bumped from a flight, he received a voucher for a future flight. But he had to use it before the end of March of 2007. He decided to go back for a longer look at Pompeii, booked his flights across the Atlantic from JFK International, and I booked myself on the same flights so we could fly together. The plan was: a couple of days in Rome, then down to Naples, Pompeii and other ruins.

As I examined the area with Google Earth, on a lark I typed in “Frosolone” and watched the picture on my computer zoom out from Pompei and quickly back down to the town. I clicked on driving directions between the two, and seconds later a detailed route was laid out. The driving time was listed as a mere two and a half hours. For us, that wasn’t quite the case, but more about that later.

I emailed Rich about it, and he, being adventurous, was all for it. We would rent a car in Pompei and spend a night in Frosolone. Where, we didn’t know, but we saw that there were hotels and bed and breakfasts there.

If you know the first thing about the radio business, you know that there’s virtually no employment security. One week before the trip, Rich called me with the news that his commercial classical station was changing its format – to country music. There’s not much call for a classically trained country music deejay, so he was out. The trip was still on, but it didn’t seem like it would be the carefree trip we had imagined, with his future so up in the air. And off the air.

But if you know the second thing about the radio business, you know that it’s totally unpredictable. In three days, he had an offer from the LA public radio station he had left twenty years before – KUSC. Not only was the new job more rewarding in the long run, but it also would give him a breather of a few weeks at the end of the Italy trip before he had to be on the air. It put a new, improved carefree back where the old carefree had been, and so, a week later, we met at JFK’s international terminal a few hours before our flight to Rome, and our trip began.

A whirlwind two days in Rome – St. Peter’s, the Forum, the Pantheon, the requisite Trevi Fountain, the excavation revealing Julius Caesar’s assassination site, a ghoulish crypt of skulls and bones at a Capuchin Church on one of the city’s seven hills, great gelati and even greater meals, then off to Naples, to change trains to Pompei and continue our dip into 2,000-year-old Italian history.

If you follow in our footsteps, be sure to take advantage of the Campania Artecard – a 25-euro three-day pass good for train travel, two free first admissions and subsequent half-price admissions to virtually every site of interest throughout the region, including the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, where incredible bronzes, mosaics and X-rated artifacts are displayed. Artifacts have been removed ever since Pompeii was first excavated in the mid 1700's.

All of the sites – Oplontis, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Boscoreale, Stabia and others are reachable by the commuter rail and national train systems. Helpful maps are included with the Artecard, as well as information in six languages. We bought our discount packages right at a special kiosk at the Naples train station, from a beautiful young Italian woman who appeared to be well versed in every modern language.

The excavation at Oplontis was our first stop. Only uncovered in the mid 1960's, it’s pretty well established that this area, in the modern Italian city of Torre Annunziata, was a suburb of ancient Pompeii. The elegantly-decorated buildings and gardens that you can walk around and through make up the immense villa that was occupied by Poppea, the Emperor Nero’s second wife. We spent a couple of fascinating hours there, where we saw many more workers restoring the site than there were tourists.

We planned to spend the next entire day walking through the ruins of Pompeii, but awoke to find a steady rain, which was forecast to last all day. It helps to be flexible when you travel, so we decided to make the rainy day the day to ride the train into Naples and visit the Pompeii artifacts at the archaeological museum. A good decision, and an amazing few hours.

One of the biggest surprises was our coming upon the eerie skull mosaic that anyone who watched HBO’s recent series, “Rome,” would recognize. I had thought some art director made that visual up, but it’s genuine. It was found in Pompeii – a tabletop or floor in the dining room of an architect’s house. The artisan who created it, most likely Greek, depicted an unrealistic skull, with ears. Above it is a carpenter’s square and plumb-bob – some interpret this as representing death as the great leveler. Below the skull is a butterfly, which in Greek is psyche, the same word for soul. The butterfly/soul is on top of a wheel, which can be seen as the circle of life. It’s a first-hand demonstration of the mind-set of 1^st century Pompeiians – a “memento mori,” reminder of death, a message in the dining room to enjoy the pleasures of life. For the opening of the television series, all today’s computer graphic artists had to do was copy the mosaic and animate it. It took on a much more somber but equally prophetic meaning for 21^st century viewers.

Next: to Pompeii and beyond -- way beyond.

Troy to Frosolone

I recently came across LaPosta wines -- some Argentinian-Italians' creations that are highly rated.

It sparked a lot of memories of my mother's family, so I decided to recount the story of how I managed to visit the tucked-away little town they came from. Here's the first part of the story.

When Frank and Rose LaPosta opened their confectionery store in 1924 at 34 Fifth Avenue, on the southern edge of Lansingburgh, New York, just across 101 ^st Street from Troy, they didn't have to look far for scissors to cut the ceremonial ribbon. They had a pair or two of forbici (the Italian word for scissors) that were forged in Frank’s hometown of Frosolone, Italy, with the name La Posta stamped in. Where those scissors are now is anybody's guess, but now I know there's another pair on display in Frosolone's cutlery museum. I know, because I, a grandson of those LaPostas, managed to get there and see those scissors in March of 2007.

Family stories are often hazy recollections of things parents say when the children are too focused on the future to care much about the past. But this much we know about the La Posta side of the family – sometime in the late 1800's, Frank left Frosolone, a medieval town in the southern central part of the Apennine Mountains for Hartford, Connecticut, to find work in a city that was as famous for making cutlery in America as Frosolone once was in Italy.

Frank and many of his townspeople eventually settled in Troy, a city that was famous for the bigger products of its iron foundries – bells, stoves, valves and of course, plates for ironclad ships that first did battle in our Civil War. We know there were many Frosolonesi in Troy, because Frank La Posta was a charter member of the city’s Frosolone Social Club, a fact proudly stated in his obituary notice in the local paper in late December of 1944.

He died when I was just two days shy of my sixth birthday., so I didn’t know my grandfather very well, but I remember sensing my mother’s sadness at the passing of her father. I grew up knowing Grandma better, because a couple of years later, my mother, father, sister Rosanne and I moved from our cramped quarter of the Visk home on Liberty Street to a two-family home my widowed maternal grandmother owned near her store. (My father’s family name was changed from Visco to Visk, probably due to the lazy pronunciation my family used, usually dropping the final vowels of Italian words. Although for a couple of years, the Troy City Directory listed my father’s mother’s name as Florence Wisko. Go figure. I reclaimed the original family name in the 70's.)

A few years later, we moved to the third floor of the building that housed La Posta’s. By then, everybody who came into the store called Rose “Gram,” just as her real grandkids did. But I regret not asking her about Grandpa and Frosolone and what was so special about the town that caused these Italian immigrants to form a club around it.

For a long time, I’ve wondered about that town, not even knowing where it was. I once asked an Italian student who I was helping to learn English about it, and he said it was an area near Rome. I found out recently that he was thinking of a place called Frosinone – which has no relationship to the town of my ancestors, even though of all the Italians I asked about Frosolone, only one – a rental car agent in Pompei – didn’t confuse it with the similar-sounding Frosinone, which is both a province near Rome as well as its capital city, with a population 16 times greater than Frosolone.

But, first things first. This is the story of how, to my surprise, I went to central Italy at all, about the amazing things you can see and do there in a week, and topping it all off, how an offhand comment to my traveling companion a week before we left found us planning a trip to Frosolone on our last full day in Italy to look for La Posta-made scissors. And how that quest became the high point of the entire trip.

Some background:

Rich Capparela has been a friend of mine for twenty-seven years and counting. Many of my friends become friends through our work – I’ve been an advertising writer and broadcast producer since I was nineteen, and I met Rich because he is a classical music announcer with a mellifluous voice, and I was one of the first in the business to hire him to add gravitas to radio commercials for banks and other retailers.

His “day job” back in the seventies was as a deejay at public radio station WMHT-FM in Schenectady, and as often happens with talent like his, he was offered a similar job in a much larger broadcast market – Los Angeles. At the beginning of 1980, a few weeks before he was to drive his little yellow Honda across the country, he was complaining to me about having to drive alone. I had taken a one-year-only job, as Communications Director of New York State’s Commission on the International Year of the Child, and it was winding down, so I was about to be free, without employment prospects. I said, “I can go with you.” I thought it would be fun. He thought so too, and we made our plans for our own, not very Kerouac-ian, “On the Road.”

We shared the driving, we found great hotels at half price AAA specials, ate well and saw some of the country, got into a little trouble around the Grand Canyon, avoided big trouble in Amarillo, and became good friends. Through many ups and downs since, both his and mine, we remained friends, even though he’s stayed on the West Coast and I on the East. I even timed a cross-country trip on Amtrak with my wife, Eileen, in order to arrive in time for his wedding reception in the early nineties. And he and Marcia occasionally come east to visit.

After several years at the public radio station in LA, Rich eventually found a better niche at a commercial classical station, and established himself as a commercial classical host of several symphony orchestras and has a successful recording studio and website (cardiffstudios.com)

So, now it’s 27 years later, and once again, he’s complaining to me about traveling alone, this time to Europe. It’s late in my career, I’m now semi-retired and working in an Albany advertising agency just two days a week, for a friend who’s flexible about my hours, and she encouraged me to say to Rich, as I did back in 1980, “I can go with you.”

Next: On our way.

How Do You Get To Madison Avenue?

No, it's not a twist on the old Carnegie Hall joke.

Whenever I've talked to college undergraduates about the advertising business, there's usually a question like “How do you get into the business?”

That's probably the toughest question I'm asked. And the easiest.

Toughest because I can't predict the path that will get you there. And easiest because it gives me a chance to talk about ME – and how I got there.

I come from a stage-struck, star-struck family. My father, along with his three older brothers, were mightily influenced by show business. Uncle Jimmy (Vincenzo) wrote and produced local shows in Troy's Little Italy, based on the vaudeville and minstrel shows that came to the area in the early years of the 20^th century. Although politically incorrect today, ethnic stereotypes and minstrel shows were still popular back then, and Uncle Guy (Gaetano) was in a large black-face group called the Georgia Honey Boys. He proudly displayed a group photo of the men, in costume and makeup, which I always thought was rather odd, not only for its blatant racism, but for the fact that you can't recognize any of the people behind the burnt cork.

Uncle Tony was in every production, but as I recall, he didn't contribute much to the creation of the shows. He was usually the mysterious tall dark and handsome stranger.

My dad, Frank, was usually the naïve boy in the production, and later, the romantic lead.

Eventually, they licensed more professionally-written plays and performed them in local venues, helping to bring the community together and raise money for local churches, schools and organizations.

They welcomed the next generation, and soon my double cousins Anthony and Guy Junior were writing and performing sketches, cousins Mickey, Mary Anne, Diane and Marie were singing, dancing and doing impressions of popular entertainers like Al Jolson. We were all involved in putting on variety shows to raise money for the USO during World War II.

After the war, two things continued my interest in the entertainment field. My father, who had settled down with a wife and family and a job in a local factory, took his family to Manhattan for occasional weekends of seeing live Broadway shows, and movie premieres at Radio City Music Hall.

Also, cousin Anthony returned from the war and studied comedy writing on the GI Bill, wrote gags for people who appeared on Groucho's “You Bet Your Life” and even had a western comedy sketch stolen outright by Milton Berle. He eventually got a job as a radio writer at a 50,000 watt top 40 station. And when he left, when I was 19 and still not out of college, I talked myself into the job. I learned by doing, and from there, the move to ad agency writer, and the opportunity to expand into writing commercials for TV and ads for newspapers and magazines seemed logical.

There's more to the story, of course – a love of words, of movies, a desire to be behind the scenes.

So mine was unusual path to the ad business, to be sure. But that's the point I always make to students – there are many paths to where you want to go, and in the ad business, you can get to use everything you experience along the way.

Inspiration

You never know where inspiration will come from. At some point in the recent past, after I had moved back to the Capital District from Manhattan, and rented a post office box for my free lance business address, its location necessitated a daily drive past a “gentleman's club,” to put it nicely.

Let me state unequivocally here that I have never entered the place, having gotten enough of an idea from that kind of establishment, which shows up in movies and TV shows, especially the Bada Bing from The Sopranos.

But one day, the local club posted a sign whose slightly prurient double meaning made me laugh, and then got me thinking. Phrases like this one are what make the titles of country and western songs stand out.

So, what was I to do? Write a song with that title, of course. I just changed the plural to singular. Here's how the lyrics came out.

Girl Wanted (For Various Positions)

by Frank LaPosta Visco

They told me you answered a help wanted sign

But it wasn’t what I expected.

It was at a bar at Twelfth & Vine.

I walked in, hoping you were rejected.

But they couldn’t turn away a woman so fine,

When they were givin’ out auditions.

And you were just what they had in mind with the sign

That read: Girl Wanted for Various Positions.

Girl Wanted for Various Positions --

And none of them are for me.

Girl Wanted for Various Positions --

Not one of them for me.

I sat at the bar and watched you dance,

Remembering the night we got married

While other men dreamed of future romance,

I saw ours was dead and buried.

You bent over backwards for me back then,

But you never got recognition.

Now you’re so forward with other men,

The Girl Wanted for Various Positions.

Girl Wanted for Various Positions --

And none of them are for me.

Girl Wanted for Various Positions --

Not one of them for free.

I know too late if I treated you right

I’d have what I hope for most:

You’d be home in our four poster tonight,

’stead of workin’ at your post.

Give up this job & I’ll provide for you --

I’ll make your happiness my mission.

I’ll be flexible, I’ll be true

To The Girl Wanted for Previous Position.

Girl Wanted for Previous Position

If only I could make you see.

Girl Wanted for Previous Position --

The one you had with me.

The Man, The Myth

How many times have you heard it: “Don't believe anything you hear, and only half of what you read.” Well, after spending ten years in New York, I came back home to where it all began. And discovered how true that can be.

I was at a favorite spot for lunch with cartoonist/humorist John Caldwell and some local advertising people. John introduced me to them, including Rachel, a young artist who was working as an illustrator for a department store. As soon as she heard my name, she said, “Oh, I know about you.”

“What do you know?,” I asked, intrigued.

“I know about how when you worked at Madison North, and you couldn't come up with an idea, you used to disappear for days, then come back and have the solution.”

Like most myths, this one had a speck of truth, around which a pearl of impossible proportions had been layered on -- and in just a little over ten years! At the risk of dimming the stars in her eyes, and losing a little personal luster, I had to turn this myth back into reality.

Any kind of creativity is work, even though it's fun work. What really happened way back when in the mid-seventies, was what happens to writers -- blockage. You can't think of an idea, a way to make a strategy come to life in a way that will make the ad stand out. When that happened, I would simply take a walk. Luckily, the agency was in an historical and beautiful section of Schenectady (yes, there are such things) called the Stockade, recalling the original Dutch settlement.

I would walk out the door, around the corner and the one block to my apartment, whose backyard sloped down to the Mohawk River/Erie Canal. I'd sit there for a few minutes, maybe even a half an hour, clear my mind and go back to my office in the third floor garret, and try a new approach.

Rachel's version was a lot more interesting than the truth. And even though Rachel was disappointed, and maybe you are too, I think the lesson is more important than the myth.