The Widow And The Orphan

Initially traveling to Italy in 2010, my goal was two-fold: explore Genoa and the Italian Riviera and attempt to locate family in a mountain village outside of the city. All I had to work with at the time was the name of the town (either Orero or Isolona), the name of the family (Sanguineti) and precious little else.

Inquiring at the bus kiosk at the Genova Brignole train station near my hotel, the ticket manager explained there was only one bus to Orero a day. When asked about the return trip from Orero, she replied: “domani” (tomorrow). Feeling like a neophyte and unprepared (and unwilling) to spend a night in the hills, I gave up.

When son Jory and I visited Genoa in 2013, I hatched an idea to hire a cab driver fluent in both Italian and English. “Would that be possible?” I asked Libero Sterlocchi, our hotelier. No sooner said than done; we had enlisted the services of Andrea Giovanelli (below), who also spoke Genovese, which would come in handy.

Venturing off into the hinterlands of Liguria, we pointed ourselves north and landed in Costa D’Orero near Casella. Unfortunately, as we would later learn, there were two villages in Liguria with the same name and we went to the wrong Orero. The next summer, my brother Richard and family found the correct Orero, near Cicagna.

Subsequently, in 2015, daughter Gina and I would once again enlist Andrea Giovanelli to escort us to Orero (and more specifically, Isolona), where we found the Sanguineti family -- Iva, Anna, Andriena and Andrieno. Their grandmother, Anna Brichetto, was the younger sister of our great-grandfather, John Brichetto.

In 2016, I visited the Sanguinetis again before searching for the family of my grandfather, Carl Joseph Cargni, in Torino (below). There, I learned that Carl Cargni was born an orphan of “unknown parentage” and was adopted by a family in the small village known as Chialamberto in the Piedmont region of the Italian Alps.

Years later, in the late-1920s, my grandmother, Gemma Emilia Brichetto, had lost her first husband, Antonio. A chef at an Italian restaurant in Portland, Oregon, Antonio died unexpectedly in his late-20s. A few years later, she met and married my grandfather, Carlo Giuseppe Cargni, and the union produced two children: my mother, Charlotte Nitta Cargni and my uncle, John Valentino Cargni.

With Andrea’s help with translation, I was able to relate the story of my beloved grandparents to the Sanguinetis, how they came to America separately -- more than a decade apart -- and then met, married and had a family of their own. I described it as a love story: "The Tale of the Widow and the Orphan.”