Ethnicity described through facial features has always fascinated me - just a little more scientific inclination and I could have been a physical anthropologist. As are many passions, mine was encouraged by curiousity about my own heritage. Sure, on paper, I'm one half Northern Italian and the other Sicilian, second-and-one-half generation; but with such rich, heterogeneous roots between both families I've been unwilling to limit my understanding to the general regions in question.
And, more importantly, I've never exactly considered myself a picture-perfect Italian - and certainly not what you'd expect from a Sicilian. Most people wouldn't care but for me, it's a sort of paradox: I'm drawn to physical ethnicity and my own happens to be a bit of a mystery, therefore I'm drawn to study it even more. The platinum-blond shock of hair I had as a kid has long since darkened to brown, but my skin is hardly a shade apart from that of most Northern Europeans and my eyes are blue. An acquaintance once commented that I do have a "statuesque" face like a Roman bust - in other words angular, complete with cleft chin, high cheekbones and a square jaw - but my nose is only faintly Mediterranean. It's not the honker you'd expect on a guy with a vowel on the end of his last name; really, I've seen more beak on Black Irish and Welsh. And though my scalp and beard are thick, my beard is patchy - and when was the last time you heard of an appeciably full-blooded Italian who couldn't grow a beard?
Though recessive genes from my mother were required, I obviously inherited the lightness from my father. The Ubaldis are from Perugia - and possibly descended from some serious canonical nobility - while my grandmother's side can trace ancestors to the Piedmont region near Switzerland. Folks got in, as they say, over the fence. That may have been the case with the Ubaldis, as well: you can see that my grandfather's father was well over six foot with girth to match, not exactly a typical pizan. There's another picture of him - damnably, I haven't seen it in years - that's more instructive, as he remarkably resembled the German brute tangling with Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. How does that translate to looks? I hate a stereotype, but let me put it this way: if my father and I walked down the street on a Saturday wearing yarmulkas, nobody'd think twice. Dad grew up in Queens; when he studied at Syracuse University in the late 1960s, between his accent and looks, more than one person thought he was Jewish. Then again, my mother insists that in one photograph taken for his collegiate fencing team he looks Chinese. Take your pick.
My mother's family is from Sicily. Agrigento. Not too dark, but only people with their glasses off might not make the Mediterranean connection. Easy enough, right? Wrong. The place has spent the last 2,500 years as civilization's hard-knocks LEGO set. Build it up, break it down, pass ownership to the guy who just gave you a black eye. Watch him build. Sucker-punch him, take it back. Build again. And so forth:
The site upon which Agrigento was constructed has been inhabited since prehistoric times, but it was not until about 580 BC that a group of people from Gela, originally from Rhodes and Crete, decided to found Akragas, taking its name from one of the two rivers which confine the city...The city reached its height under the tyrant Theron (488-472 BC)....The philosopher Empedocles (c492-c432 BC) advocated a moderate form of democracy which lasted for some time. In 406 BC, Akragas suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Carthaginians, who destroyed it. It was rebuilt in the second half of the 4C BC by Timoleon, a mercenary general from Corinth engaged in the fight against the Carthaginians in Sicily. It was at this time that the Greco-Roman quarter was built.
...In 210 BC, Akragas was besieged by the Romans. They conquered the city and changed its name to Agrigentum.
Vicissitudes of Girgenti – With the fall of the Roman Empire, the city passed first to the Byzantines, then into Arab hands (9C). They built a new town centre higher up (at the heart of the modern town), calling it Girgenti – this lasted until 1927, when its Latin name was restored – which became the capital of the Berber kingdom. In 1087, the town was conquered by the Normans, prompting a new phase of prosperity and power which also enabled it to repel the frequent attacks of the Saracens.
Assuming that each party involved managed to leave a few representatives throughout the series of violent transfers of power, I've got Greek, Carthagian, Roman, Berber and Gallic blood in me. Probably not enough French for a propensity to appease dictators, either. Not bad.
But theories are much of what make up my knowledge of ancestry. Modern recordkeeping is just that: modern. My father's father went back to Italy in 1948 and could only trace our lineage about 150 years; before that, the Church kept records and my grandfather couldn't read Latin. Nobody has made inquiries on my mother's side. I actually happened to take two classes under the above-linked professor, Kenneth Pennington, when he taught at Syracuse. His answer to the origins of the Ubaldis? "Speculative fancy," before you go very far. And it doesn't help one's burning curiousity to know that a Parisian friend of my sister's - whom she met several years ago when the girl was on co-op in Cleveland - has the surname "Obaldia."
Sometimes I feel a pang of jealousy for someone able to say that they're "Irish. Dublin. Lived there all the way back to when we beat each other with tree trunks." There's a comfort to that kind of certainty. But it wouldn't be nearly as interesting if it weren't this way, would it?
