8 May 2016

Yesterday (Saturday) Myrna and I drove two hours, mostly on Autostrada (toll freeway, where you can drive quite fast), to a mountain village north of Torino to find the village, population 450, of  Castelnuovo Nigra.  This is the place where Amber Caretto's (our daughter-in-law, married to Mark) Italian ancestors came from a little after 1900.  We found a pix of the birth record for her grandfather on Family Search, although it has probably not been officially indexed. My brother, Fred Hoopes, who has indexed over 12,000 of these Italian records, helped us decipher the writing,




Our goal was to find Grandpa Peter's grave, and we did. This is the grave, which even includes a pix. Graves are mostly found in the walls around the town cemetery.  The people can only be buried there for about 100 or so years, then the remains  are removed (dumped in a common grave). We need to learn more about this.  We couldn't do it yesterday, because the city hall was closed on Saturday, our P-day. There are a few people who are actually buried in the ground, but this is probably expensive, and also isn't forever.




The village is a charming place, and there were a few people around yesterday.  We spoke with the only other person at the cemetery, a nice looking, relatively young Italian woman, who, when we told her who we were looking for, said she is related to them.  She said that last summer a couple from Colorado, USA, came to look for their ancestors.








This is the "Main Street" of Castelnuova (which means new castle) Nigra.  We followed this woman, who was walking down the middle of the road with her fresh flowers. Thankfully, no cars were coming.  Italians drive way too fast.  In the background is the main piazza with the old church, which, of course, we visited.






The front door of the village church, which had a sign on the side that says it is being restored by government grants.













Inside the church, there was one old man praying when we first went in.  As he left, he told us to keep the door open so the sun could get in to help warm up the cold church.

Church from inside the main front door. Lots of marble. There has probably been a church here for 800 or more years, but most decorations are from the 1600s, according to style of architecture, painting, etc.









An old street sign, saying Via Caretto Capella, or the way to Caretto Chapel. We went on the road but did not find a chapel.









We drove a couple of kilometers straight up (lots of switch backs) the mountain to a place called Caretto, marked by a sign, that says Caretto Inf, which I suppose means Caretto Inferiore, or lower Caretto, although we did not find an upper Caretto or a chapel, just a few houses, some of which looked like summer homes for wealthy people from the city, perhaps Torino. This is in the province of Torino, which has several million people.




This is now Sunday evening.  We went home/visiting teaching this evening to two of our assigned four families.  It was a good and somewhat unusual experience.  I took a pix of one of the apartment buildings with my cell phone, and when I get the cable from our apartment I will upload it and write about home teaching.   This has been another great week.  Today was Mother's day, both in Italy and the US.  In Relief Society today Myrna received a long stem fresh red rose and they had refreshments.  Italians are into fresh flowers, and the roses around where we live are beginning to bloom, and I suppose will bloom all summer. Also, along the roads there are lots of red poppies, like what you see in tourist pix of Italy.