From "home" to home

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I visited Italy for the first time in my life June 25-July 13. I stopped in New York City and felt the church-like awe of Ground Zero, then took a 15-day bus tour that began and ended in Venice. The Isle of Capri and walking alongside the works of Michaelangelo and Rafael in the Sistine Chapel were among the highlights, till I headed for the birthplaces of my mother, my grandparents, my uncle and my aunt.

Mione is my grandmother's birthplace. Pellizzano is where my mother, grandfather, aunt and uncle were born. In an amazing adventure, folks who had never met me gathered in the northern Italy mountains to help me find the house where my grandmother was born, and look up relatives in 200-year-old records in the Marcena church two doors from my hotel room. And, armed with a spoon I brought from Cuyahoga Falls, I scooped up 4 rocks (for myself and my three children) and dirt from the yard of the Pellizzano church where my mother prayed as a child.

Before I left New York City, I went to Ellis Island, found my mother's name on a Nov. 1, 1920, passenger list, and walked down the same Stairway to Freedom that my mother did when she was 9 years old and on her way to my native West Virginia.

The view from Mione was awesome, with peaks of the Alps vying with each other for attention. For good measure, I went 200 feet into Austria, near the Brenner Pass, and was photographed in another country that I had never visited before.

Then I came home for a week in the Caribbean with my younger daughter's family from Brunswick. Cozumel, with hurricane damage still evident; Costa Maya, and a bus ride to the Chaccoben Mayan ruins; and a third visit to Ernest Hemmingway's house of cats in Key West.

And then on to Michigan and Grand Lake, a few miles from Lake Huron, where I visited my friend since first grade at Sts. Peter & Paul Catholic School in the coal mining town of Monongah, West Virginia, famous unfortunately for the 362 workers killed in the 1908 mine explosion.

Now I have to sift through nearly 1,000 photos and get them organized into something resembling order. Fortunately, I marked down the town, place and photo number as I took the pictures.

Nothing left to do now but get ready for another West Virginia University Mountaineers football season, in my usual seat with my sister and a different grandchild for each game.

Well, there is a December trip to California, with a personally escorted driving tour by someone who lived there for decades before she returned to Ohio.