ROME - It's Friday night and Maria Coletta McLean is jet-lagged and a little disoriented from the long flight from Toronto to Rome. Usually, she would just drive straight from the airport to her small house in the village of Supino, about an hour outside of Rome. But since she published her book, My Father Came From Italy, about renovating an old house in Supino and taking her elderly father back to the village that he had left when he was 19, her yearly journey to Italy is always full of surprises.

She still seems a little shocked that she wrote a book at all. Once her children were grown, Coletta McLean had returned to York University, in Toronto, with the idea of becoming a teacher. But one of her instructors suggested she take a creative writing class. Then an assignment to write about her father turned out to be better than she thought and, before she knew it, she had published her first book.

Letters and e-mail messages have been pouring in since the book's publication in 2000, from all over the United States and Canada. It seems like everyone has a relative from Supino. "When we're in Supino, people come to the door because they have read the book," Coletta McLean says. These are people who have come from Canada and the United States trying to trace their own relatives. "Or sometimes they come to the bar saying they've been to the house and the neighbour said we're down at the bar having coffee, so they come down to the bar."

The reason Coletta McLean is sitting at a sidewalk table in Rome, sipping a glass of wine in the glow from the lights of St. Peter's Basilica instead of sleeping in her bed in Supino right now, is because of the book.

It happened the way it always does. Last year as she and her husband, Bob McLean, were packing to leave for Supino, a letter arrived from Sergio Coletta in Mississippi who had just read My Father Came From Italy. He picked it up because he recognized his own name "Coletta" and, when he read it, discovered that it was about his own birthplace of Supino. It turns out they are long-lost cousins.

Coletta McLean took the letter with her and she sat on the steps of Sergio's recently deceased aunt's house in Supino to write him a response. When she was finished, she snipped a piece of cedar from a bush by the doorway and sent it off to him.

Just as she was preparing to leave for Italy this year, another letter arrived from Sergio Coletta. This one had directions to a hotel and restaurant near the Vatican that Sergio's son-in-law Fabio's family owns. And now that she is family, they were expecting her for dinner.

"It's been like this since it was published," she says, as a plateful of roasted chicken and potatoes lands on the table in front of her. "I am amazed to see how many people have contacted me to say their grandparents came from Supino and moved to Detroit, Windsor, Toronto and even Texas and Mississippi."

In her suitcase, Coletta McLean has packed a list of people she has promised to try to track down for readers. She's even meeting one young woman from Boston who wrote to tell her about going to Supino to look for her grandmother's relatives.

"She had a similar experience of going back and trying to find some relatives and she ended up meeting the wrong relatives. But they fed her and she took all these lovely photographs of them." She didn't realize they weren't her relatives until she returned to Boston and told her grandmother all about it. "She's coming back again this year to see if she can find the correct relatives this time."

Coletta McLean has also heard from people who knew her father when he was a truck driver for Toronto Macaroni delivering pasta all over Ontario. "We were at a Supino social club event in Michigan and I met a woman there who told me a lovely story. She grew up in Windsor and her parents had a tiny grocery store. My dad used to deliver the pasta to her store every week. He
brought not only boxes of spaghetti and linguine, he also brought stories of the people in Toronto or in Sarnia or Sault Ste. Marie who were from Supino. They were all connected this way," she says. "This woman said she was in a bookstore and saw my book and she opened it and saw the passport photograph
of my dad and she knew who he was."

Part of the reason people seem to feel they can contact Coletta McLean is because of the tone of her book. She does tell a charming story about a village and her father's return to it, but she injects reality into the story as well. In the last few years of her father's life, her mother became somewhat abusive toward him. And when Coletta McLean wanted to take her father to Italy, she had to do it against the strong objections of her
mother. Her readers can relate to all this.

"My mother had a sad story of her own. She married when she was 25 because there was an Italian tradition that if you don't marry by the time you are 25, you become like wine that is left too long in the bottle, you become vinegary," says Coletta McLean. Her mother was in love with a young man who wanted to be an opera singer but he was not ready to think about marriage. So, when Loreto Coletta asked her out on a date, she thought it would be the perfect way to make the opera singer jealous. Instead, she ended up marrying Coletta. In later years, she seemed to take out her frustrations and thwarted desires on her husband.

"I have an aunt and uncle in a similar situation. They seem to spend all their time thinking up ways to annoy the other person. My husband and I always said we're never going to be like that." Coletta McLean's husband is a big part of the book. She portrays him as the one behind the whole project to buy the house and take her father to Supino. And she writes about him with gentle humour as he learned the Supino way of doing business (if no one is in the shop to serve you, you go and see if they're having coffee at the bar), and how to drive like an Italian (fast, and when you get to a red stoplight, if there's nobody there, you go). She also describes how he scandalized the village by going to the bar each morning to order a cappuccino for his wife and then taking it back for her to drink on her balcony.

This time she's going to Supino with one of her six children and two of her 10 grandchildren but, for the first time, without her husband. When they returned from their holiday in Italy last August, Bob Coletta McLean was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died two months later. "Bob had been so healthy all his life. He was the kind of guy who never even caught a cold. So for him to come down with something like that and for it to be so sudden,
it was a horrible shock. My children are having a terrible time of it," Coletta McLean says. He was only 58. "We were married young and I'm glad of that because we had 38 wonderful years together. We still had a long time together."

She's rather glad to have a day's delay in her trip to Supino and to have the chance to visit with her new-found cousin Sergio's son-in-law Fabio's family and to eat at their restaurant. "I have some mixed emotions about going back to Supino tomorrow. I know everyone will come to the house and say how sorry they are. I understand it's part of the tradition. But I think it's going to be hard."

But once it has all been said and the condolences have been delivered, she is hoping they can all relax together and she can unwind a little. She has the list of relatives to look up for some of her readers, and who knows who might show up at the door. She also has some notepads with her in case she feels like writing, although she laughs about the fact that she never
intended to write the first book. "I want to take my mother's story, that tragic love affair," she says. "I want to follow that along and see if I can't do something with it."

By Jeannie Marshall
© Copyright 2002 National Post