Day 6 was spent traveling. We said goodbye to our awesome little house in Feriolo. We had made friends with the old lady on the floor under ours, and she gave us a ride to the train station at Baveno, which was a relief, because we thought we were going to have to take the bus with our heavy suitcases. We took the train from Baveno all the way down to Novara, where our new host picked us up from the train station. Her name is Luisa, and she's awesome! Her family lives above the apartment that they rented us.
Novara is a comfortable city. It's small by European city standards, but it's just big enough to have everything you could want in a city. Today we walked all over Novara, and saw some beautiful things. We found a street fair with tents representing just about every country in the world. We talked to the guy in the Argentina booth, who was selling choripanes and asado. We also bought some arancini from the Sicily booth, and some strange things that we don't know the name of from the Napoli booth.
In the train station on the way to Mosezzo we ran into the missionaries. They invited us to a ward activity tomorrow night. We're excited to meet the ward!
We took the bus out to San Pietro di Mosezzo. It's a super small town, and there's really nothing noteworthy to say about it. I can see why my great great grandmother left that town. We went to the civil records office and knocked. No one was there, and it was closed. We were about to leave, but just like the mission, I decided to ring the doorbell one last time. Just like happened on my mission countless times, they opened the door right as we were leaving. They let us in, and we submitted a request for the records we were looking for, because they wouldn't let us in to see the records ourselves. We went to the church, and the priest wasn't there. Unfortunately, there's a huge shortage of priests in Italy now because none of the new generation want to be priests. So usually now priests cover four or five churches instead of one like it used to be. We found out from the locals that the priest of Mosezzo lives in Novara, and they sent us to the Curia of Novara.
The Curia of Novara is an incredible church! It's absolutely huge inside! The roof is so far above your head that you can barely make out the artwork on it. We caught the priest in charge of the archives just in time, right as he was walking out the door. He said he was in a hurry, but that I could send him an email, and he would look for my records for me. His email address included Novaria, which was the old Roman name for Novara. I made a casual comment about that, and he looked up at me. He said "Wow, I'm very impressed that you know the Latin name of my city! You're a foreigner and you know that, and the vast majority of the inhabitants of the city have no idea about that!" That made him warm up to me a lot. The perks of being a history nerd!
All in all, we didn't see any results yet, but we set ourselves up to have lots of success tomorrow. Tomorrow we're going to Romentino, the village where Giuseppe Cattaneo was born. Let's hope all goes well! Here are the pictures for days 6 and 7.
No comments:
Post a Comment