We can say that Italian cemeteries are of one of two kinds, town or country, or maybe a combination of the two, who knows. Every classificatory scheme runs the risk of distorting the truth as much as it promises to clarify it. I thought of this as I was walking to the market this morning, and passed the cemetery of the small mountain village in which I now live, Ruffrè-Mendola.

It is a Saturday morning and there was one woman in the cemetery, and she was doing some kind of work around what I assumed was a plot or group of headstones that belonged to her family. The cemetery is quite small, fittingly given the size of the village, but the family grave sites are quite large and can be quite elaborate, holding the remains of at least a few family members, often spouses, and often of people who lived long ago, but not always, so nonni and bisnonni, it seems, those born in the late 19th or early 20th century, if not before.