The photo is small, faded and precious. It shows Cristina’s great-grandfather as a young man in Navelli, standing beside a fountain before leaving Italy for the Americas. Decades later, Maria Cristina Fabrizi returned to the village to find that fountain.

“I’ve been looking for my roots here for a long time,” she says, with a hint of emotion, in an episode of Rai’s television series Radici d’Italia* devoted to the small village in Abruzzo. “My great-grandfather left when he was young, and I have only a few photographs of his life in Navelli. Now I want to understand where we really came from and what remains of our history.”

Navelli, a stone village perched on the Piana dei Navelli in Abruzzo, has spent generations sending its people away. They left for the United States, Venezuela, Canada and elsewhere, carrying suitcases, family names and memories of home.

Now their children and grandchildren are coming back.

“A lot of people left back then,” Marco, Cristina’s guide, tells her. “But a lot are coming back, especially their children and grandchildren, to rediscover their roots.”

For Cristina, it starts with a fountain. In Navelli, one memory quickly opens the door to another.

A Ship To Venezuela

One of the village’s oldest residents remembers leaving Navelli himself, at 16. He set out at 4 a.m. from Piazza San Pelino, traveled to Naples and boarded the Conte Biancamano for Venezuela. He arrived in La Guaira on March 18, 1954.

“I was 16. It was an adventure,” he recalls.

The sea was rough, but the teenager was captivated. “I stood there watching the waves. I liked it.” He would spend the next 70 years in Venezuela.

His story echoes through Navelli, whose population may have shrunk but whose community abroad never disappeared. Its families are scattered across the Atlantic, yet their ties to the old town remain stubbornly alive. Some have returned. Others keep homes here while living abroad. And some have taken Navelli with them.

Anthony’s family emigrated to Canada. He still speaks Italian because, he says, “we always spoke it at home.” He returns to Navelli every year.

“Here in Canada, I don’t have a house. I live with my family. I have a house in Navelli. I want to come back once a year.”

He has even planted saffron in Canada.

“I try to create a little Navelli here at home,” he says.

The connection has become part of the village itself. One of the districts in Navelli’s traditional donkey race is now associated with descendants of emigrants in Canada. The story is no longer simply about those who left. It has become part of Navelli’s identity.

A Taste of Home

The village’s past is everywhere, but it is not a museum piece.

In nearby Bominaco, Don Oreste and Mario lead Cristina into the Oratory of San Pellegrino, known as the “Sistine Chapel of Abruzzo.” Its medieval frescoes were a Bible for people who could not read, covering the walls with scenes of Christ, angels, demons and the eternal struggle between good and evil.

Then there is the Panarda, an ancient ritual in which seven unmarried young women carry baskets of bread from house to house. And there is transhumance: the old movement of shepherds and enormous flocks along the tratturi, the ancient livestock routes that once served as highways through the mountains.

That world has largely vanished. The flocks are gone. Many shepherds left. And many of the people who worked this land followed them overseas.

Along the old route stands a monument to the “emigrant shepherd,” a tribute to those who abandoned their homeland in search of a better life.

In Navelli, emigration was never simply about departure. It changed the village itself. Today, another piece of that inheritance survives in the fields.

Saffron is Navelli’s “red gold,” and producing it demands almost absurd patience. It takes roughly 200,000 flowers to produce a kilogram. Each flower has just three red stigmas, which are picked by hand and carefully dried.

“If saffron is the patience of the fields, the Panarda is an ancient communal ritual,” says Berardino, who helps preserve the village’s traditions.

Eventually, the patience of the fields reaches the table. Anna Agnese makes sagnette with chickpeas and saffron, combining homemade pasta with chickpeas, pancetta and rosemary before adding the precious spice.

For Cristina, it is more than lunch. It is a taste of the place she has spent the day trying to reclaim.

When The Roots Call You Back

Wine tells the same story in another form.

Diego left Navelli and eventually returned with his wife. Back home, he reclaimed the family vineyards and began making wine, following a passion handed down by his grandfather.

“Our roots called us back, my wife and I,” he says.

His grandfather had been an emigrant, too. Returning to the land was a way of picking up a family story that had been interrupted generations earlier.

In the cellar, old wines and new bottles stand alongside memories of the people who came before. Perhaps that is why Navelli continues to draw the descendants of those who left. They are not simply coming back to see where their ancestors lived.

They are looking for what survived.

A fountain. A church. A family name. A recipe. A vineyard. A field of saffron. And sometimes, an old photograph.

Cristina finally finds the fountain in the picture. She stands beside it, recreating the image of the great-grandfather who once left Navelli for the Americas.

The photograph is no longer simply a record of someone who departed. It has become evidence that, after all these years, he never really left.

In Navelli, roots can cross an ocean, survive for generations and still point home.

*Radici d’Italia is a Rai television series produced as part of the “Roots Tourism” initiative promoted by Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU program.