A few pics from first day

Hotel Breakfast Garden--where breakfast is served

 

Fish Market

 

One of many famed portico walkways.

Parma Hams & Parmagian Cheese

Truly Fresh Fish

 

Typical Bologna Street

 

Our Trip to Bologna

As stated in previous post, posting to blog is an unexpected challenge; so, please be patient.

Our flights were relatively uneventful. On the full flight from Newark to Munich we had the option of mucho forms of entertainment: 200 movies, countless music options, games, follow the flight maps and data, wifi, etc. Linda and I both selected to watch the movie "42." Harrison Ford deserves an Oscar for his depiction of the Brooklyn Dodgers owner. The transfer in Munich was a by the very skin of our teeth, even had airport PA calls for us, by name, to board. We did make it. "You are the last chickens." And, the door closed behind us. We had a wonderful guy driving us in Mercedes from the airport to our hotel. The traffic was very heavy, cars, bicycles, motor scooters, trucks, buses, and foot traffic. All converging. Our driver in all this is using both hands to tell us about his city while constantly referring to his tablet for translations and explanations. All being done at high speed. Distracted driving is not a term here. And, just to make it more interesting, much of the time you are flying down streets not much wider than the car with 120 turns and all kinds of adds pulling into your path with no seen signals. Just the trip from the airport provided two books worth of stories.

Have pics I may just post to give you flavor of what has been a wonderful beginning. Linda has shown that she may not be fully conversant in Italian, but she is able to read any menu and to ask questions about how a dish is prepared that requires the waiter to go to the kitchen seeking answers. Seeing the many food stores, everything is fresh, no frozen, no canned.

Going to post this.

Yes, we have arrived as Linda in front of Italian hotel proves. Having problems getting onto blog. Did not anticipate that in Italy everything on web is in Italian. The challenge of turning off when all instructions are in Italian. Then Blog is very different from 3 years ago when in Poland. So please pardon my mistakes and taking a while to get started. Our flights from Portland to Bologna was long but nice. Going to post this picture.

The Beginning.............

For nearly 2 years Linda (Parrella) and Stan Mozden have planned for a trip of a lifetime. ................................ ----Linda is Italian. Both sets of her grandparents came from Italy during the first few years of the 20th Century. Eventually they settled in Rumford, Maine, where they worked for Canadian entrepreneur Hugh Chisholm who provided the vision and finances to transform Rumford into a world-class working-class mill town. Thus, Oxford Paper Mill was built. Italian immigrants supplied the skills and workers needed to build one of the best and largest paper mills ever. Linda's ancesters were amongst the very first Italians to make Rumford their permanet homes in the US. ................................ ----Our initial attempt to book the trip in summer 2012 gave us an education about when to travel and to book trips like ours to Italy: 1)To get the best deals book 5-6 months ahead. 2)The best time to go is during the harvest season, September/October. 3)We needed to tell those helping to prepare the trip and set the itinerary precisely what we wanted to accomplish. 4)No canned tour would satisfy our trip desires. 5)We needed much more information about Linda's family. 6)If carefully planned it could be done within a reasonable budget. 7)We were not ready and too late for Fall 2012. ................................ ----We spent the next year hounding all of Linda's relatives for family history and documents. Many of the family were surprised with what was gradually pieced together. Some of the family common wisdom was found to be incomplete and/or misunderstood. We found that some of the most valuable documents about the Italian connections were those in the State of Maine archives: service records, birth and baptism certificates, city directories, newspaper articles, town property tax records, etc. Learning detailed history of Italian-Americans in the US and, especially, Maine was essential to establishing who was in Linda's family and their relationship to each other (the family tree). ................................ ----We discovered that one set of Linda's relatives, the Bussoloris, were defense witnesses in one of the most famous immigration law cases in American history: Sacco & Vanzetti in 1920. ................................ ----The most valuable find was that both sets of grandparents homes in Italy had been long misidentified. Linda's mother's parents (Sassi & Bussolori) were from a Catholic parish named San Matteo della Decima (St Matthew the 10th) in San Giovanni in Persecito in the Provence of Bologna. Learning that shortly before Linda's grandparents left Italy there had been an armed conflict between the Catholic Church and the peasants over taxes collected as parish donations went a long way to explaining why the Sassis became Methodists shortly after coming to Rumford. Linda's father's family (Cavuoto & Parrella) came from two different hamlets (Cassano and Roccabascerana) in the town of Roccabascerana in Avellino Provence in Campania Region outside of Naples. This was discovered by finding Linda's grandmother's record of crossing, the Passenger List of the boat she came to the US on. Without this information and subsequent findings we would have been going to the wrong towns and hamlets. The planned genealogical search in Italy would have been interesting, but fruitless. ................................. ----Besides tracing Linda's family and seeking cousins, the trip has been planned for us to experience the culture of those sections of Italy from which the Italians of Rumford, Maine, came with a stop in Rome. This Blog is intended to be a record of our experiences and observations as we do the trip. Each day we will be posting something of our trip. Come each day to see how we are doing.