Moving to Italy: Day 3—A stroll

On our third day at Gabi, George walked us around the farm. The houses in the little compound were owned by a cross-section of people, most of whom lived in Torino. He pointed out to me and to the boys the uncles' houses, other people's houses, where it was all right to roam, and where it wasn’t. Fields surrounded the compound. Through a long history of inheritance and purchase, the fields belonged to a patchwork of owners, and some were rented out to other farmers. Goerge didn't want the boys to inadvertently run where they shouldn't and ruin any crops.  It was rare to see a house standing by itself at the edge of a field, as is common on American farms. The farm houses in that area were usually clustered together on a hillside, probably originally for mutual defense and support. The houses at Gabi were attached to each other in an irregular pattern. Each house shared at least one wall with a neighbor. Sometimes the walls ran parallel and sometimes at right angles. Our bedroom and the children’s bedroom shared a wall with the back of Zio Remo’s house. Zio Mario’s (a Torino uncle) house and Zio Silvio shared a side wall on the same side as Zio Remo's house, and our "Apple House" backed onto Zio Silvio's house.

Matthew and Margaret Ann in one of the fields

 When we walked up the road to Bertola and looked down on the zig-zag pattern of houses at Gabi, we could see that it was not as illogical as it first appeared. Building one house on the back of another helped to provide a sense of privacy for each family. George’s uncles lived in houses that were in a row, and their front doors faced a common courtyard area, but all these houses had been built by their family. Our house, which was around the corner, had originally belonged to another family who built it so that its courtyard and front door were not visible from any other. Another factor in the way the houses were built was the physical geography. On three sides of the Gabi hamlet, the land dropped away sharply, while the fourth side went straight uphill. That limited the flat places for houses and barns, so the ancestors had built where they could leading to a mishmash of boundaries and access rights. The little community was sparsely populated on our arrival, and when I looked down on Gabi from Bertola, I saw how isolated it seemed in the surrounding landscape.

View of Gabi from Bertola