“When will I return home?”Quando tornerò a casa?
He was told it was about a united Italy.
Prosperous. Taken seriously. Finally counted among nations. That was the promise the regime’s newspapers made to young men in the south, and Lucio was a young man in the south — from Salerno, by the sea, where the horizon goes orange at the end of the day and the water turns the colour of wet metal.
He volunteered. He did not interrogate the promise, and almost nobody did. What he understood was narrower and more honest than the propaganda: that a man who served might come home with something to pass on. Not only his name and his hands, but land. A better arrangement for his children than the one he had been handed.
So he went to Africa. Before he left he planted, and the smell of manure over fresh seed was the last thing about home that stayed with him — a debt he intended to return and collect.
“A foreign port welcomed me.”Mi accolse un porto straniero.
The British took him, and the war became a boat.
He was captured in North Africa, where the British took Italian prisoners in numbers no camp on that continent could hold. The overflow was shipped east — through Egypt, out across the Indian Ocean, to camps in India and Ceylon. Lucio spent a year on the island now called Sri Lanka, about as far from the Sele plain as a Salernitano could be put.
What the family remembers of that year is a detail about food. The prisoners cooked for the men who guarded them. What came back to the prisoners were the potato skins. He ate potato skins, and he cooked well, and both of those facts are still repeated at this table eighty years later.
He also came home with hepatitis, which he did not talk about much.
“I’ll be waiting with a red rose.”Ti aspetterò con una rosa rossa.
Then Italy changed sides, and so did his war.
On the eighth of September 1943 Italy signed an armistice, and overnight tens of thousands of Italian prisoners stopped being exactly enemies. Those who agreed to co-operate were put to work alongside the Allies — most of them for the Americans, in service units formed the following spring. Lucio was among the men who took that turn. He had gone out to fight one war and finished it working for the other side of it, which is a thing that happened to a great many ordinary Italians and is almost never told plainly.
Release took longer than the fighting did. The Italian service units were stood down in October 1945; most men were not home until the winter after. His route back ran through Britain, through the paperwork of a war being unwound.
He already knew the woman he would marry. She had told him, before he left, that she would be waiting — and that there would be a red rose. Of everything in this story, that is the line the family has kept most exactly.
He fixed military trucks. The trucks bought the land.
What he brought back from the war was not a medal. It was a trade. He built a company repairing military vehicles — engines, axles, the unglamorous mechanics of an army that no longer needed to fight — and he made it work.
In 1975 he bought this ground. Thirty-five years after leaving to earn land by serving a state that never delivered it, he simply purchased it, with money made from the wreckage of that same war.
There was one line of olive trees on it. That was all.
“What binds us does not break.”Ciò che ci lega non si spezza.
The land went to the daughters.
In this family, as in much of this part of Campania, the houses pass to the men and the land passes to the women. It is not sentimental. It is a way of keeping the ground undivided and in hands that are unlikely to sell it.
So the land Lucio bought came down the female line to his granddaughter Gerardina Di Cunzolo, who holds it now. Her sister Asunta held her share alongside her until she died in 2023. Every serious decision about what grows on this ground has been made by a woman, and the men who work it are working land that was decided for them.
It is worth saying plainly, because it is the reason the vineyard exists: nobody sold. Through the fallow decades, when the ground made almost nothing, nobody sold.
Two hundred olive trees, and vegetables to pay for them.
In 1995 and 1996 they planted two hundred olive trees into ground that had held one row. Between the trees went broccoli and eggplant — the crops that actually paid, while the olives spent their first decade doing what olives do, which is nothing you can sell.
By the turn of the century the trees were productive. Nobody in the family was making wine. Nobody nearby was either; this was a plain of vegetables and buffalo, not of cellars, and the idea would have sounded eccentric.
Then from 2018 the ground was left. For three years nothing was worked here and nature took the place back — which sounds like neglect and was, in the end, a kind of rest. The soil spent those years doing nothing but recovering.
“Shall we start a vineyard?”Facciamo una vigna?
Four varietals, into ground that had never held a vine.
Enrico asked it in 2021, the way these questions get asked in families — half a joke, at a table, by someone who had been turning it over for a while. There was no vineyard here to restore. There was olive orchard, three fallow years, and a plain with no tradition of wine.
It took three years to answer. The plants were bought in 2023 and went into the ground in 2024. That gap is the honest part of this story: nothing about starting a vineyard from nothing is quick, and the family spent two years deciding before they spent a euro on a vine.
They planted four.
Two that were always here. Two that crossed. Nobody planted them as a metaphor, but it is the shape of this family.
The vines are two years in the ground. They have not yet said what they are. Somewhere around 2032 they will, and everything built here between now and then — the table, the letters, the circle of people who follow it — is a way of bringing people along until the wine can speak for itself.
Aglianico
Campania’s great red. Late-ripening, structured, tannic when young — the grape that made Taurasi and the reason this region is taken seriously.
Fiano
The vine of the bees. Honey and hazelnut with age, floral when young. Required in the Cilento appellation that starts a half hour south.
Syrah
At home in warm Mediterranean ground. Pepper, dark fruit, and the variety most likely to show us early what this plain can do.
Viognier
Apricot and white flowers, low yields, unforgiving of a careless picking date. The most demanding thing planted here.
There has been an American side to this family since before the vineyard existed.
In 1958, Asunta crossed to visit family in the United States. That crossing is older than the olive trees, older than the purchase of the land, older than anyone here thinking about wine.
It is the reason this estate has never thought of America as a market. There are people over there who belong to this table and have simply never sat at it. Everything we are building for the distant half of this family — the letters — comes from that, not from a business plan.
Two shores, one table.
Rosicapezze is worked and decided by people on both sides of an ocean — an arrangement that started with a crossing in 1958 and has never been undone since.
Gerardina Di Cunzolo
Holds the land. Granddaughter of Lucio, and the reason there is still ground here to plant.
Enrico Ferrentino
Asked the question in 2021, and planted the answer in 2024.
Catarina Ferrentino
Feeds everyone who works here.
Charles Bonsignore
A phone call and a red rose reconnected Gerardina & Charles.
Nate Bonsignore
Prunes, trains, and photographs.
Larry Bensel
Tastes everything before anyone else does.
