GORGA, a “Five-Star” Town

“Five-star” denotes a luxury hotel here in Italy but I’ve now baptized Gorga, southern Latium village perched on a rocky outcrop, as a “five-star” town. While Roman friend Iva and I wandered the labyrinthine backstreets of this town of her ancestors, I found five (or more?) keystones of 16th-century arched entryways bearing the star. One of seven children of farmers, Iva’s mother was born in Gorga and grew up in a house with two rooms, one for sleeping, one for eating. But they lived in the town only in the fall and winter.

Stars mark the center of many a Gorga doorway arch

Star in the center of the arch

In late spring, all headed along la mulattiera (literally, “a road for the mules”) to another humble two-room house flanking their fields in the valley ten kilometers below Gorga. Like all the other farm families of Gorga, Iva’s family trekked down la mulattiera with the men hauling the heavier farm equipment or driving a farm cart loaded with household goods, the women carrying on their heads family bedding and clothes, the older children helping and holding the hands of the little one. The luckier families had donkeys or mules to help.

View from Gorga

Our June walk through Gorga was a nostalgic one for Iva: here and there, we met elderly people out for a walk leaning on their canes or sitting in clutches on the benches near the fountain of the one town piazza (“We’re passing time til lunch,” smiling white-haired Geltrude explained) – and many fondly remembered Iva’s mother – “ah, Desdemona”….and shared their childhood memories with her. More than one was related to Iva. Gorga’s past lives on in the stories shared by clutches of elderly on benches in the medieval backstreets, in Gorga’s one piazza.