Long Life, Part 1

Today I was tempted to quote the whole first few pages from the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The subtitle of the book is The Story of Success. The part of the book that I am going to lift is the introduction and it is entitled The Roseto Mystery. It has something to do with long life or the maybe the better term is “good life.” It started with this quotation from the author: “These people were dying of old age. That’s it.”

He defined the word Outlier. According to him, he referred to it as a noun. He gave two definitions: 1. something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body; and 2. statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample. By definition, we can already predict that he was referring to people who did things differently, perhaps a thing or some things that are/were unacceptable and got away with them.

Here’s Gladwell’s masterfully written chapter.

“Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine – Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely clustered two-story stone houses with red-tile roofs.

For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night. Life was hard. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.

In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans – ten men and one boy – set sail for New York. They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan’s Little Italy. Then they ventured west, eventually finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city near the town of Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one group of Rosetans after another packed their bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream of immigrants became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leaving entire streets of their old village abandoned.”

(To be continued)