Alexandre Belmonte

2. Childhood among hills, animals and dialects

I was born in a public maternity hospital in the beautiful imperial neighborhood of São Cristóvão, once the heart of Rio de Janeiro, on September 17, 1975, the second child of a family formed outside their homelands. Anyone would say they were "two Italians," but between my father's Calabrian family, newly arrived in Brazil in the late 1950s, and my mother's family, coffee farmers in Espírito Santo, of Trentino and Mantova origin, who migrated to Rio in the early 1970s, the Calabrian side prevailed. And it prevailed in the voice: in the traditions, in the food, in the language. It was a decidedly dialectal family. It wasn't until I began studying Italian, when I was around 12 years old, that I understood that the language we spoke at home wasn't exactly Italian, but Calabrian, more precisely Belvederese, a unique variant of Cosentino spoken between Praia a Mare and Paola, probably the most incomprehensible dialect in the region, known as the Riviera dei Cedri.

For a long time, I heard that the cedars there—the famous cedri calabresi, citron in Portuguese, a species of Citrus medica—had begun to be planted by Jews who arrived in the region many centuries before Christ, during the first diaspora. But this story, though repeated with some local enthusiasm, doesn't hold water. The festival of Sukkot itself, in which citron is used as one of the four sacred species, only became established as a structured ritual much later, when the Temple in Jerusalem was already functioning, and with greater force after the Babylonian exile. The association between ancient Jews and citron cultivation in Calabria is, at most, a symbolic reconstruction created centuries later to invent a historicity for rabbinic Judaism. The appreciation of Calabrian citrons by Jewish communities only clearly emerges from the Middle Ages onward, especially in rabbinic sources such as responsa and halacha treatises.

What is a fact—and I have seen it myself—is that every year, between September and October, Orthodox rabbis from various parts of the Mediterranean, Israel, Europe, and even the United States, arrive in the region in search of the perfect fruit to celebrate Sukkot. I have witnessed entire groups inspecting crops with meticulous attention, using magnifying glasses in markets, examining each fruit with great care. I have also seen Ashkenazi Jews in their shtreimel hats, buying enormous, symmetrical etrogs for almost unbelievable prices. The Calabrian landscape is transformed these days, with the coming and going of eccentric figures who, amid murmurs in Hebrew and Yiddish, walk between the orchards and markets.
It was among the Calabrians who had recently arrived in Rio de Janeiro that I was born, and we lived with them in the same building for almost 15 years. They were people connected to the land: goat and sheep herders, like my father, landowners and farmers who dedicated themselves to many activities, the main ones being olive cultivation, pottery, music, and commerce. My uncle Antonio inherited the musical tradition. I never saw him play, but in the family, we often talk about his physharmonica playing. My grandmother Rosaria played the tamburello, a type of tambourine used in tarantellas. My father always loved to sing, and we were always a very musical family. I inherited this taste from a very young age. Parties were common at home, with lots of food, drink, singing, and dancing, especially after we moved to a larger house.

In my childhood, my parents and siblings lived with us on the first floor of the family building, in what had once been the basement of a Japanese mansion (from whom my grandfather Salvatore had purchased the house). On the second floor, in one of the houses, lived my grandmother, the matriarch Nonna Rosaria, with her many dogs and cats, and many pots of basil, as well as Uncle Marco ("João"); in another part of the house, the uncle immediately older than my father lived with his family. Yet another uncle, Luigi, lived with his family, his six children, and his wife, in the west side of the city.

Many years later, the building grew upward, on that seemingly endless lot, whose wall still borders Machado de Assis Park, at the highest point of the hill, from where one has a 360-degree view of that part of the city: from the Rio-Niterói Bridge to Corcovado, passing through Tijuca, the city center, and the Santa Teresa, São Carlos, and Estácio de Sá hills. Everything was there in plain sight: Central Station, Sugarloaf Mountain, the port, Morro da Providência, the Sambadrome, the Metropolitan Cathedral, City Hall—Pinto Hill seemed like a panopticon from which we watched the city rise, and where we stayed up late stoking bonfires on the nights of São João, or during visits on December 24th and 25th. Italians always visited each other on this occasion, exchanging dishes typical of another landscape, made with nuts, figs, wine, honey, egg custard, and the finest flour. Cannaricoli, grispelle, embiolati, and puddings were passed between neighbors who spoke Belvederese dialect. My grandmother was the only one who didn't speak Portuguese, and even with the Brazilians, she continued to speak in dialect. Everyone understood her, or at least that's how it seemed to her. She never had trouble making herself understood on that hill that simulated her hometown on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

3. Education and school experiences

I attended Colégio Pedro II, where I entered high school at age ten. There, we learned not only the subjects of the basic national curriculum, but also Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, German, chess, typing, and theater. There was an Olympic-sized track with a long jump area, gymnastics, a semi-Olympic-sized pool, and several multi-sport courts, as well as an indoor gymnasium. We had art and music classes, and our schedule, already at fifteen, included separate classes in Math I and II, Organic and Inorganic Chemistry, Portuguese, and Literature. Between the forest garden, the two libraries, and the physics, chemistry, and biology labs, we were happy children and teenagers who, in huge flocks, crisscrossed the city by bus: beaches in the South Zone, downtown, Tijuca, and many neighborhoods in Rio's suburbs, for birthdays, June festivals, and weekend getaways.

It was with my friends from Pedro II that I began traveling around the state: to the mountains, then the Lakes Region, Angra… In my travels, experiencing and sharing silent rebellions, I lingered more in some places than others. Since I was little, I traveled with my parents and siblings—by truck, van, sedan. Dad was always working and took us along. Perhaps to compensate for being almost always busy, he indulged our every whim—to Mom's dismay. We often returned to Rio with rabbits, chickens, and quail. All, of course, alive. My mother complained, saying that "animals are a lot of work," but eventually relented.

When I was thirteen, we moved to the house where my parents still live, on the same street as Pinto, right between the port area and the city center. On a small farm, Grandma raised her chickens, and we even had a pig. There was a little bit of everything there: mango trees, avocado trees, jackfruit trees, guava trees. My parents grew potatoes, sometimes cassava; there were always plenty of basil and parsley plants, and even a coffee tree, and a small pond where we often went to gather watercress for our lunch salad.

Many Italian women, including my grandmother, chatted in Calabrian dialect while Dona Carola dried peppers in the sun, or my grandmother led her dogs, tied to a single rope, to the market or the fair on Santo Cristo Street. Santa, Eva, Antonietta, Maria, Carolina, Rosaria—women from the same region who, not coincidentally, found themselves in Rio de Janeiro, on that hill overlooking the Sambadrome of Marquês de Sapucaí, the city center, and Central do Brasil. They were a network of related people: eight or ten families, with a few scattered throughout the city. We didn't attend church—or, if we did, it certainly wasn't because of our parents' religious beliefs, although almost all of us had catechism classes and some made their First Communion. The first signs I noticed that my family had Jewish roots came from my dad's bestemmie, when he was incazzato. But that's a topic for another time.

Very early on, my cousin Dodô and I would go downtown. We were agile and attentive children. We'd take the little goat to Central, sometimes in a group, and have lunch together. It was a blast. A bunch of kids.

4. Travels with his father and Calabrian memories

Every Thursday, my father worked in Serra dos Órgãos, delivering goods to various locations, from Petrópolis to the most distant districts of Teresópolis, passing through Nova Friburgo. Descending through Cachoeiras de Macacu, we always stopped to swim in a waterfall. I always accompanied him. We would wake up at four in the morning, load the truck, and climb the mountain. We read many books while waiting for unloading time; we always had lunch somewhere unusual, and my father would always tell many stories about Calabria. On other occasions, we would travel to the Lakes Region, Minas Gerais, or on long family treks through Espírito Santo.

Even in the midst of such tropical natural landscapes, there was always something that reminded him of his homeland. He spent much time describing in detail the paths where he herded sheep, goats, and kids. Paths of vines, signs of the devastation left by war, the sea far below, accessible. My grandmother often went down to fetch seawater and cooked nettles in it. That was all she had. My grandmother had five children during the war; my father was the third. Many of these stories were retold to me years later, back in Italy, by Zia Angelina or Zio Daniele.

5. The first crossing: return to Calabria

When I graduated in 1997, I received a generous scholarship from the Italian government for a study trip to the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, at the confluence of the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas, very close to the mountain where my father was born in 1941. The experience of being there for the first time was intertwined with the memories I had built throughout my life, composed of the stories my father, uncles, and grandmother shared about their lives in Calabria. Little by little, it all made so much sense to me that I no longer felt like a foreigner. My uncles, aunts, and cousins took me everywhere: to discos, beaches, porcini harvesting in the Apennine Mountains, motorcycle rides. I accompanied my cousins to set up hammocks along the olive groves. In October, with the autumn winds, the olives were beginning to fall.

I chose to tour the villages on an old Vespa viola. My aunts competed with me, always outdoing each other in delicious dishes that connected me, through taste, smell, and gesture, to my family in Brazil. It was a year in which I explored more than half of Italy's twenty regions, until I finally went to study in Reggio Calabria.

Decidedly Orthodox and considered one of the gateways to the Hellenic world, the region vividly preserved its linguistic, gastronomic, and musical roots. Many surrounding villages, such as Gallicianò, Roghudi, and Pentidattilo, still spoke Griko—a variant of Koine Greek deeply rooted in local orality and traditions—and the street signs were bilingual. Reggio Calabria, in turn, was a true crossroads of civilizations: there, I encountered at least fifteen different languages at Dante Alighieri University, a confluence of peoples and ethnicities, where borders blurred and we could revel in the fact that we were all foreigners to one another. The city was rightly proud to house in its National Archaeological Museum the famous Riace Bronzes, two enormous bronze sculptures from the 5th century BC, whose powerful expressions and anatomies emerged intact from the seabed to reconnect that part of Italy with Greek, Orthodox, Jewish, and Muslim antiquity.

Calabria was also a land of ancient transgressions. While peasant revolts erupted in resistance to the structures of the feudal world, Tommaso Campanella—born in Stilo, in the heart of the region—challenged the dogmas of the church and the truths inherited from Aristotelian scholasticism. Between arrests and interrogations, Campanella dreamed of a society governed by reason, astrology, and a communion of resources and goods, scandalizing the defenders of order. Heterodox thinking, typical of Mediterranean civilizations, coexisted with social and moral rebellion in the rugged landscapes of Calabria, where the mountainous terrain and Hellenic memory had always conspired against any form of blind obedience.

6. Echoes of insurgency: from fable to craft

I've always been intrigued by uprisings in the ancient world. As a child, I listened with fascination to tales of barrels of boiling oil being poured from the battlements of Aragonese castles onto those who dared to rebel. These narratives, a mix of history and fable told by my father, spoke of starving peasants who, armed only with sickles, rakes, and sticks, scaled walls and defied powerful lords. I always understood this place as a space of a rebellious force that reappeared cyclically in my life, like a thread running through and connecting time.

7. American crossings

From Argentina to Cuba, from Cuba to Italy, from Italy to the backlands of Minas Gerais and Tocantins, I reached the Argentine, Bolivian, and Peruvian Andes when I became an adjunct professor at UERJ—where I studied for my undergraduate, master's, and doctoral degrees. I lived for a year in the Andean region of Argentina, in Jujuy, and another year at the foot of the Córdoba mountains, conducting postdoctoral research at CONICET centers. I discovered archives, people, and landscapes, and experienced Argentina's generosity firsthand. I learned to love it as my second home.

One of my grandmother's brothers, who had come to America on the same ship as her, immigrated to Buenos Aires. Her grandmother followed her husband to Rio, and the other brother continued on, settling with his family in New York. Being in Argentina was, in a way, also being at home. I visited local synagogues, spoke with Rabbi Yovi and Rabbi Marcello Polakoff, and began studies with Rabbi Gabriel Pristzker—an immersion into my origins, reconnecting my senses and reconstructing memories.

8. Bolivia: the archive and the square

About ten years ago, I arrived in Sucre, Bolivia, to participate in a conference of the Association of Bolivian Studies—a meeting that soon proved to be transcendental: both for its connection to historical and ethnographic research and for the human bonds formed there. There I met people who became close friends and work partners. Bolivia became one of those springs to which I always long to return—a generous, beautiful, and resolutely insurgent land. I witnessed, through reading documents and through daily experience, many rebellions that brought the mountains and hills to a standstill, while also learning that many others occurred discreetly: in the streets and squares, in markets and communities, in small gestures, details, everyday practices as resolutely local as they were universally powerful.

9. French autumn and return to Italy

In October 2022, I took a leave of absence and was able to spend a season in France, between the Hautes-Alpes, Marseille, Nice, Paris, and Grenoble. I visited Monaco and Switzerland with Stéphanie and Philippe, my host, who directed the Théâtre National de Gap. With them, I saw the entire season of national shows. I interviewed a sheepherder who also does photography and art around the wolf, the villain of Alpine shepherds. I reunited with my cousin Francesco in Rome, twenty-five years later, and saw Olivier Zabat and Emmanuelle Manck in Paris, whose son, Adrien, just a few years younger than my son, Luca, was finishing his master's degree in Mathematics at Jussieu-Paris Rive Gauche.

10. Affections that cross borders

Before returning to Rio de Janeiro in January 2023, I visited Carmen Bernand at her home in Paris. I told her I didn't know how or when, but I would take her to my alma mater. In March 2025, at the end of my tenure as coordinator of the Graduate Program in History at UERJ, I managed to bring her to the seminar commemorating the Program's thirtieth anniversary. Other prominent historians also participated: Christine Hunefeldt and Paola Revilla Orías—the three of us met in Sucre in 2015—Henrique Espada Lima, with whom I began a postdoctoral fellowship last year in the Graduate Program in Global History at UFSC, and Amy Chazkel, an urban historian from Columbia University.

This story continues...

1. Marginal geographies, rebellious vocations

For many years, I have dedicated myself to the study of rebellion, protest, and practices of resistance, in dialogue with historical experiences forged in the daily life of the city of Rio de Janeiro—a territory where social and political transgression long predates the arrival of European ships. Rio was the scene of indigenous wars, enslaved African uprisings, German colonist revolts, and even mutinies by "starving and drunken" Irish mercenaries who, according to documentation, complained of having been brought from so far only to starve: the bread, they said, "was so bad that not even the horse would eat it." An Atlantic city, marked by encounters and conflicts, its historical vocation for rebellion is profound, plural, and continuous.