Ortona Read Free

front windows brightened by painted shutters and an iron rail balcony.
    The tourists noticed little of Ortona’s increasing poverty. They gathered each morning on the beach to the south of the town to worship sun and sea. The beach and Ortona’s prospect over it were the reasons the town was known in many corners of Italy as the Pearl of the Adriatic. Swarms of children played in the gentle surf, while thefathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, sweethearts, and friends gathered under their umbrellas — the younger ones in bathing suits, the older in ever darker and heavier-weight clothes — spaced tightly together in the manner favoured by Italians who sought not privacy but community on a beach. In the afternoon, after taking the main meal in Ortona’s
trattorias
and
ristorantes
, they returned to the hotels and
pensiones
for the siesta. With the setting of the sun they rose to join the locals in the ritual promenade up Corso Vittorio Emanuele. The broad main street of Ortona was fronted to the north in Piazza Municipali by the two-storey municipal building, with its distinctive clock mounted just below the roofline. Before the bars and
trattorias
on the corso, cloth-covered tables were set out and waiters wearing starched white shirts and precisely pressed black pants fetched carafes of the rich red
montepulciano
, cappuccinos,
grappa
, and sweet cake. Later, when the evening darkness had settled in, the vacationers again filled tables in the
ristorantes
for their second main meal. They savoured the pasta smothered in black mussels or the lightly fried mullet, either of which had been drawn that very day from the sea before the town. Others preferred the grilled lamb brought to Ortona in the morning by the farmer from the highlands near Guardiagrele. When the meals were done and if the weather was still fine, as it usually was in the summer months, musicians played on Corso Umberto I. Dancing and much festivity would continue into the small hours. 1
    On Sundays, vacationers and townspeople alike gathered in the various churches of Ortona to take Mass. The main cathedral was San Tomasso, with its great frescoed dome and an adjacent watchtower that rose up almost as high as the upper reaches of the brass-roofed cupola. Cattedrale San Tomasso was so named because it purportedly housed a tomb containing the sanctified remains of the Christian apostle Saint Thomas, often referred to as Doubting Thomas because he initially questioned the truth of Christ’s resurrection. When Thomas demanded physical proof of the resurrection, Christ appeared before him and asked him to touch his wounds. Stunned with the truth of the resurrection, Thomas said: “My Lord and my God,” thereby explicitly acknowledging Christ’s divinity. Legend held that pilgrims to Rome who viewed Saint Thomas’s remains in Ortona would enjoy a safe journey to the Vatican City.
    Cattedrale San Tomasso may have been the grandest of Ortona’s churches, but the oldest was Santa Maria di Costantinopoli, believed to have been originally constructed in the fourth or fifth century AD, although it was heavily overlain with medieval construction and by the 1930s only the base foundation was authentic. According to local lore, this church was founded by Saint Mary Magdalene herself, prior even to the erection of the Byzantine-era structure — so that the ground upon which the church stood was among the most consecrated in Italy. This church was of narrow construction with a simple stone exterior and, by Italian standards, a relatively plain interior. It stood on the southern outskirts of Ortona, its back close to a steep embankment that fell away to the intersection where the coastal road and railroad met the Ortona-Orsogna lateral road.

    From the time of his birth in 1930, Americo Casanova lived near the old church. He was a happy child, but at just two years old one rather large shadow was cast over his life.