How, you ask, does one acquire a former crypt converted into a bathroom? In the 1980s, the Italian government sold old abandoned houses and castles in the Umbrian countryside to foreign investors for pennies, and my dad and some friends bought a medieval castle called Borgo di Montemigiano. After several years of painstaking renovations, it was converted into seven different houses.
The oldest section of the castle is owned by an Italian family, The Angeletti’s, whose ancestors inhabited the town for several hundred years. In fact, they can trace their family’s ownership through the eldest male heir back to the 1600s when everyone’s last name was the name of the Pope and records get fuzzy. This kind of passing down of property to the oldest male heir is called the Law of Primogeniture and has functioned to keep properties in families without selling off assets when a parent passes and splitting the value of the property between the heirs. But it’s a real bummer if you’re the second male, or worse yet, a female.
Angelo Angeletti is in his mid-80s, but his piercing blue eyes still light up like a curious child when he talks of the past. He has bouts of forgetfulness now, but is always happy to share a memory about his childhood growing up at Montemigiano with his family during World War II. A few years ago, some Montemigiano partners helped him publish a memoir in Italian, and it was recently translated into English.
“If the Stones Alone Are Left to Speak” is a well-written and fascinating account of Angelo’s childhood surviving constant starvation, thirst, the war at his doorstep, and “the promise of shoes that never arrived.”
This is the passage that gave me pause:
“My Aunt swept the floor over and over - the brick tiles so worn that one would almost see the footprints left by people ‘whose teeth did not hurt any more.’ And my uncle, saw those kind of people very often; sometimes, he talked to them calmly. He also had some reprimands for some of them and could take a little revenge on those who had wronged him. My uncle would lay the shovel and the pickaxe on the mound of dirt he had just dug up and unhurriedly began gathering the bones, starting with the smallest ones. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘here is the little toe, and this one is the shoulder blade. This other one is the bone that keeps the arm attached to the shoulder.’ He worked conscientiously and put all the bones in a big, half-broken wicker basket. But, the journey was short. In just a few steps, everything ended up in the dark hole that opened in the chapel floor.” (Yep, that’s our bathroom.) He continued,“The bones would fall down, making a noise very similar to the one made by the stones collapsing from the cave during the thaw.”
Needless to say, I was creeped out by this passage, and I have ceased to use this bathroom, opting instead for the alternative “non-crypty” bathroom above ground.
My husband is unfazed and enjoys having a bathroom to himself, for a change.