Aw, Strangologalli. I knew you.

I am currently reading and enjoying They Fought at Anzio by John S.D. Eisenhower.  It provides an example of the recursiveness of life.  The longer your life the more likely you are to later learn something that would have been relevant had you known it earlier.  

For example, I attended The Lawrenceville School long ago.  In its earliest incarnation in 1810 it was known as the Maidenhead Academy, taking its name from the nearby community of Maidenhead, New Jersey.  The name of the town was changed to Lawrenceville in 1816 and the school later followed suit.

A couple of years ago, in conducting genealogical research, I discovered that the Bayless family, originally settling on Long Island in the early 1600s, eventually sent out shoots towards the southwest, including my branch.  They moved slowly from central New Jersey, into Virginia, and then further south and west eventually ending up in Oklahoma.  

Hmm.  Where in central New Jersey?  Well, as it happens, in the immediate vicinity of the village of Maidenhead by 1710 or so.  

I was both Track & Field and a cross country distance runner in high school and put in hundreds of miles of running the highways and byways of rural New Jersey around Lawrenceville.  I can't help but think that I would have been more attuned to my running environment had I known that I was running in the immediate vicinity of my fifth great-grandfather Daniel Bayless's farm.

I am having the same experience with They Fought at Anzio.  I am reading along when I suddenly come across a reference to Frosinone:

The third phase was to begin when elements of the Fifth Army reached Frosinone, in the Liri Valley near Rome. 

I know Frosinone.  I spent a winter and spring there back in 1982-3.  

Graduating college in 1982 at the height of the economic recession with unemployment at 10-15% and inflation at 20% was an unpleasant introduction to the realities of economic cycles.  On graduating in May, and having had no success in the spring recruiting cycle when companies cut back their recruitment and offers were rescinded, I made a month-long Greyhound Bus trip around the US having written to corporations everywhere seeking interviews.

Starting from Washington, D.C. I headed up to Baltimore, then west through Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, Colorado, to San Francisco and Los Angeles and then back through the southern states stopping in Arizona, Texas, etc. before returning to D.C..  Probably a dozen cities and a couple of dozen companies.  Interviews were hard to get and follow-ups even fewer.

Heading into the winter, prospects seemed bleak.  When my father offered to find me something in the oil industry, I jumped at it.  By early 1983 I was a roustabout with Microdrill AB, a Swedish drilling company, on location in the Apennines of Italy between Rome and Naples.  Hilly country, laced with creeks and small rivers and valleys, it was the picture of small farming agriculture.  

Italy is not a significant oil producing nation but they had produced some in that area in World War II.  Fields which were later closed down as uneconomic after the war.  But as implied by the name, Microdrill was a technology which promised much lower cost, precision drilling and where best to search but in places which were already known to have at least some oil production history?

I worked my way up from roustabout to assistant driller and mud engineer, formidable titles belied by the small scale of the drilling.  It was a fantastic experience and the right balm for the wounded spirit of a college graduate coming into a market where the demand for such was near zero.  I have always been grateful to my father for that assist and to the men with whom I worked.

Our base location was in the back lot of a family enterprise which consisted of a bar, a restaurant, a gas station, a grocery store and maybe there was a motel as well.  Matriarch and Patriarch oversaw the activities of sons and daughters and sons-in-laws and daughters-in-law. 

We lived in modified shipping containers which housed some dozen workers at any given time.  We worked twelve hour shifts, a month on and a month off.  One of the marking points of the passage of time was mid-month when the night crew was replaced by the day crew.  

The nearest town, some ways away, was . . . Frosinone!  The bright lights of Frosinone and its population of 40,000.  

The nearest proper village to us was Ripi.  Using Google Maps' Street View, I am able to travel some of the old trails of my youth.  

There was a village even closer to us.  In Italian, the name was Strangled Rooster.  Stragglio . . . something.  Of course with modern technology I can reinforce weakened deep memory.  Using Google and Google maps, I am able to quickly reacquaint myself with those long unthought-about towns.  I was working near Strangologalli, in the Province of Frosinone.  Not much more than a handful of structures.  

Even at the time when I was there, I was both deeply interested in and quite well read in History.  It was all around us.  Our drill sites were out in the countryside and it was always striking to me how pervasive was that ever present history.  Forget all the ancient towns and villages and churches.  

If I had half an hour while waiting for concrete to set or for the delivery of new drill pipe or whatever, I would cast around in the fields adjacent to our drill site.  They were chock-a-block full of broken pottery and other ancient detritus which could be 25 years old, 250 years, or 2,500 years old.  Just astonishing.

I knew that the area had been central to some of the great battles in the invasion of Italy in WWII which had started in Sicily, then southern Italy, then Anzio, then Rome, then northwards.  The German General Kesselring was a brilliant practitioner of the fighting retreat, slowing the allied advance at every step.

From locals, I knew that there had been partisan activity in the area during World War II, with some cave systems used for storage or hiding.  We came across a couple of examples.  

But my overwhelming attention was on the material ancient history - the churches, palaces, the villas, the castles, etc.  I knew a quite reasonable amount of Roman history in the Republic and during the empire to give some framework.  I knew a little about the Byzantine activities in southern Italy as well as those of the Normans to add a little more reference.  But the evidence of WWII was meager.

Or was it?  Perhaps I did not know enough to see it or look for it.

Hence the recursiveness of a long life.  I am reading They Fought at Anzio and can call to mind the terrain and the geography as the Allied and German armies vie back and forth around Frosinone until at last the Allies break out after a five month struggle.

Had I known then what I know now, would I have seen more than I then saw?  I have to guess yes but it is an intriguing question.  The nature of the work I was doing was full-on with no time for exploration.  Even if that had not been the case, I was at the bottom of the totem pole and would not have been given the opportunity to wander off exploring.  

Perhaps I saw all the evidence of the titanic battle that occurred in that immediate vicinity that was feasible to see under the conditions.

But perhaps not.  Perhaps there was more that I simply did not know to look for.