Il Brigante
My son Thomas and I had dinner tonight at a favorite restaurant that was nearby the condo I owned and lived in for ten years. That was from when Thomas was nine until nineteen years old. It was the home he spent time with me from when he was in fourth grade at Little Red until he was a freshman at Big Red. Compare that to my older children. My oldest never lived there at all since he was twenty-two until thirty-two. His sister lived with me there for a summer and then for a year after she graduated, so from eighteen until twenty-eight. In many ways, this favorite restaurant, a northern Italian place called Il Brigante, was special to my whole family. We all ate there regularly and ordered in from there just as regularly. The menu hasn’t changed much in the last fifteen years and while I didn’t recognize anyone there, it has the same friendly ambiance and the food tasted exactly like it always did.
In Italian, a language I learned fluently during three years in high school in Rome, took two-year’s worth in college and use regularly when I go back, Il Brigante means the robber, specifically one that ambushes people in the forrest and mountains. That would be a brigand in English. The same sorts of scoundrels from the Brigante area of southeast Ireland kidnapped St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. I don’t think the name of the restaurant is nefarious, but rather more a way of telling the community that their fare is hearty northern Italian food rather than more traditional southern Italian food dominated by pasta with tomato sauce. The pizza is thin and crisp as opposed to Sicilian pizza that’s thick and spongy. We like the food at Il Brigante, but mostly I think we like the memories of good family times spent at Il Brigante.
I still live downtown for the next three weeks, but I live about a mile from the South Street Seaport, so it didn’t occur to me to go to Il Brigante and I hadn’t been there in at least four or five years. It was Thomas’ idea to go for “old times sake” and I’m glad we did. It was a nice meal and there were good memories, but mostly it was a comfortable place to talk to my youngest child. He is twenty-four now and he enjoyed a favorite Montepulciano red wine with his Gnocchi Sorentino while I had a Diet Coke and Spaghetti Carbonara. We shared a Tartufo for desert and that really took me back. Yes, we used to get it from Il Brigante, but I can remember enjoying my first Tartufo at Tre Scalini resataurant on the Piazza Navona in the center of Rome in 1968. I can remember looking at the elaborate Baroque Bernini fountains while I marveled at the taste of the best desert I had ever had. Thomas spent two months in 2015 living in Rome (in Trastevere) and studying and soaking up Italian language and culture and all the pleasures of Rome, including Tartufo from Tre Scalini. It is one of the things he and I share, so it was a good choice of venue for a nice quiet dinner for two.
I have Italian blood in me. My father, with the given name Silvano (of the forrest, in Italian) was a Venezuelan citizen when he and my mother met in Caracas in 1948, but he had emigrated from Italy with his family in 1944. That was when he was twenty-one and he had spent his youth in the Bolzano area, set in the heart of the mountainous area of northern Italy. Strangely enough, that’s in the same Dolomite Mountains I talked about a few days ago. And it’s exactly the sort of area frequented by Brigantes. If I am 50% Italian, Thomas is diluted down to 25% by his mother’s Irish blood. But here’s the thing, while he has a reddish beard that looks decidedly Celtic, he also has a full head of wavy brown hair that is very reminiscent of my father, especially in his younger years.
I look far more Slovak (my mother’s heritage) than my father’s Italian, but given my forty-five years on Wall Street, I’m guessing I inherited some of the larceny that came to me through his Brigante genes. I have always had an affinity with Italy, but it’s hard for me to parse that between the amount due to my bloodline and the amount due to my living in The Eternal City for three formative years. Tonight, Thomas told me about his wanderlust to move around and live in the world. He commented that the only extended time he has spent outside of New York (he discounts Ithaca as being more like New York than not, which I’m not sure I agree with) is the two months he lived in Rome and he says he loved that experience.
Thomas has lived his whole life in Manhattan (downtown), Ithaca for four years of college, and now Brooklyn (he tries to forget the year he lived in Staten Island after graduation). His brother and sister spent their whole lives in Rockville Center, Long Island, Ithaca, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island. All three kids are metro-NYC kids. By contrast, by twenty-four I had lived in three foreign countries on two different continents, and four distinctly different parts of the U.S (West Coast, Midwest, Northeast and NY/NYC). Before college I had lived in eight places where all three of my children had lived in only one. After college, I chose to settle down here in NYC-metro for forty-four years (except for a two-year hiatus in Toronto). I had plenty of wanderlust, but I got that satisfied by traveling the world for business and pleasure and having vacation homes in several distant parts of the country. It allowed for more local parenting involvement.
I understand wanderlust and I understand the need for roots and stability. I think I’ve vacillated between the two extremes. I think the anthropological reality is that the human species is made up of people who are genetically predisposed to being “settlers” that prefer to stay put and sink deep roots, and people who are genetically predisposed to being hunters and wanderers/explorers. I’m too lazy to study the academic evidence of whether that construct is true or not, but I’ll bet some version of it is true. People either have a strong preference to stay put or they have an itch to move on. I’m sure there’s a spectrum on this axis, but I somehow feel people tend one way or the other. I know I am a wanderer, as I suspect Kim is. I certainly know my two oldest kids tend toward their mother’s tendency to be a settler. My dinner at Il Brigante has now helped me figure out that Thomas seems to be a wanderer at heart as well. All that means is that he has to figure out how to scratch that itch. I did it one way by traveling a lot and sticking to NYC-metro. He will now have to figure out his program, but at least he knows he has some Brigante in him.