Filogaso.

We spent a few days in Calabria (toe of the boot of Italy) in and around my maternal grandmother's birthplace of Calabria.  It's on the ridge of a hill among olive groves and sheep pastures.  It's an ancient place, but on account of being leveled by earthquakes every century or so, there aren't a great number of old buildings.  In fact, the two addresses I found in old family birth records seem to be fairly modern buildings -- assuming the house numbers haven't been switched around in a 100 years, or the buildings completely remodeled, neither of which isn't a safe bet.
What we did find were friendly people, after a point.  We stood out here fairly obviously -- too tall, too pink, Nancy blonde -- and we attracted attention. On the main street, at the cemetery (looking for names) and at the church, people just approached us and asked who we were.

Our answer was well received: long conversations, handshakes (rare in the north) and even hugs and kisses (never, except from family, in the north) from old ladies.  Everyone wanted to know my family's surnames, everyone knew someone by that name.  The archivist at city hall was a bit more analytical, he quickly printed out all the records he had in his stacks and opined on other places to look.  "LaPiana," he said, was a name from Filogaso, but "Manduca" was from San Nicola di Crisso, the town on the next hilltop.

Our main obstacle was not cheats, or thieves, as people in Lucca had warned us about, but the falloff in our language comprehension.  What would have been a walk in the park north of Napoli became a rollercoaster in Calabria.  Our school Italian was always understood, but the other side came in many flavors.  Clerks and shopkeepers generally had an accented Italian available for us, but the old folks on the street could run on with very heavy accents and (we thought) some words taken from the regional dialect.  English was never on the table, except at our hotel in Vibo Valencia, the nearby city.

The land was much more verdant that we had excepted, at least at this time of year. Thunderstorms came and left, leaving sunny and warm, humid days.  We didn't see much abject poverty (like in Naples) but people did complain about a lack of jobs, especially for young people.  Many of the local business making building materials had shut down, and we saw an unusually large number of unfinished houses and apartments.