Carlo Alessandro Pisoni has an odd hobby. He spends his weekends scouring the dozens of tiny cemeteries that dot the shores and hilltop towns of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, patiently transcribing tombstone epitaphs.
These end up on a Web site (www.verbanensia.org) that he hopes will craft an ever-sharper picture of the generations of inhabitants that once haunted this northern corner of Italy.
The ”Verbanese Epigraphic and Lapidary Museum,” as the project is called, has been likened to Edgar Lee Masters`s ”Spoon River Anthology,” the 1916 collection of poems recounting the lives - in epitaph form - of the quirky residents of a small fictional American city.
The verses, in this case, may not be as poetic, but they are no less poignant.
Take Giuseppe Girardi, the ”pioneer of the chemistry industry, the first to introduce to Italy the distillation of wood.” A man who built several factories during his lifetime, he ”was beloved by his workers” and found in music ”his greatest consolation.” He died poor, in 1911, leaving behind nothing ”but memories.”
Or Lieutenant General Commendatore Francesco Solera, a former minister of war, whose gravestone reads like a military log of the various campaigns and battles that led to the unification of Italy. He died in 1872, 12 years after Italy became a country, ”joyous to have seen the nation`s union come to pass.”
”Capturing a gravestone for posterity is a way of paying homage to the dead,” said Pisoni, who - when he`s not poking around cemeteries - works for a multinational telephone company and is also the chief archivist of the Borromeo family, the aristocratic dynasty that dominated the lake for centuries. ”Cemeteries are archives in stone, they`re a gold mine for anyone interested in social history.”
Tombstones, like diaries, give up very personal clues. ”Each one is part of a family`s personal mythology,” and they often require intimate knowledge of the departed to completely deconstruct, he said. In the explanation comes the remembering, which is the point of the exercise because, after all, he said, ”we`re all afraid of being forgotten.”
Pisoni said his approach was ”halfway between the sentimental and the technical.”
Each tomb is carefully documented on a file card that notes its position within the cemetery and its state of preservation, followed by a detailed description of the tomb and its epitaph. From this material, using the database on the Web site, Pisoni and his team of volunteer historians have been able to cull priceless information about the area`s people, their professions and past.
With 21 cemeteries already surveyed, substantial material allowed new light to be shed on emigration patterns and the area`s industrial and commercial development, for example. The museum is just part of a larger project to chronicle the Verbano, as the Lake Maggiore basin is known, and its dying dialects, monuments, bibliographic references and archival sources. The Web site had more than 100,000 visitors last month, according to an independent site meter. ”No one expected it would be so popular,” Pisoni said.
A book featuring some of the cemeteries on the Lombard shore of the lake was published in June.
”Not every tombstone tells a sad story,” Pisoni said cheerily, picking his way around some overgrown tombs in the cemetery in the Luino village of Colmegna, on the Lombard side of the lake. ”Some people had a full life, a good life; you get the sense they did want they wanted,” he said.
”But what do you say when someone is denied life before they turn 1?” he mused, kneeling in front of a simple stone cylinder with a ceramic photograph of a bonnet-clad baby nestled in a casket surrounded by white flowers. His mouth is slightly open. He seems asleep. ”His poor parents - what they must have gone through,” Pisoni said.
Other tombs give up such tantalizing clues that they beg for life`s details to be filled in, as in the case of Giovanni Dellea, buried in Curiglia, ”assassinated through the work of a vile hand,” on July 4, 1892.
And how did Henry Wynne, formerly a captain in the second regiment of the Life Guards, a ceremonial unit of the British monarch, who died on Oct. 15, 1874, at age 40, come to rest in a tiny town just south of the Swiss border?
”It seems he drank, and then went swimming in the lake,” said Pisoni. Of Wynne`s unknown life, he added, ”it does make you curious,” pointing out, on the practical side, that for centuries Lake Maggiore was a popular holiday destination for foreigners (it still is).
”If you mention Queen Victoria to people in Baveno, they`ll talk about her as though she was here yesterday,” he said, referring to a lakefront town and popular 19th century spa resort where the British monarch vacationed.
In other cases, Pisoni has managed to fill in some gaps. The tomb of Rosina Rossi Bonera, who died during childbirth on Oct. 4, 1924, and is buried in the cemetery of Dumenza, has a small metal plaque registering that it came from her ”far-away sister Armida” in Crows Landing, California.
Pisoni said he managed to track down Armida Rossi on the Ellis Island Web site to learn that she emigrated to the United States 100 years ago at age 32. She crossed on the Provence, from Le Havre, France, and landed in New York on April 19, 1907. According to Ellis Island records, she had 30 dollars in her pocket.
Some people think Pisoni`s hobby is, well, a bit morbid. (His wife, he said, does not like him to bring his two daughters along on his outings). But death, he argues, is part of life. And cemeteries are a reminder - should one need one - that in the end, there`s only the end, for all of us.
”It`s a way of rediscovering life and what`s important,” he said.