Visit Your Ancestral Homeland

LAST YEAR I honeymooned in Rome, which was a long day trip from the tiny 2,500-year-old village in the Campania region of Italy that my maternal grandparents left in the 1910s. Of course I had to go—it was surely my only chance to see where that side of my family had come from.

- NICK GILLESPIE

It's a very American thing to travel to ancestral hometowns, especially if your ancestors were fleeing poverty or political repression. Perhaps more than ever, as America grows less sure of its exceptionalism, we want to be reminded that we are lucky to have grown up in the glittering New World rather than the tarnished old one.

But the best sort of travel is that which confounds our expectations rather than confirms our prejudices. And that's what I experienced on a drizzly day in Fragneto Monforte, population 1,700, known for a relic of the 3rd century martyr Saint Faustina, for an ancient and revered tiglio tree in the town square, and, go figure, for a hot air balloon festival that started sometime around the turn of this century.