Discovering history through the stories we inherit
Interview published on The History Quill blog on Sept. 24, 2026
In this week’s blog, Gerardo Manzo traces a connection between a childhood memory and three centuries of Italian history. As he researches his roots and the world of Baroque Naples for his novel, Gerardo explores how distance can change our understanding of home, and why our most personal memories might be the most important stories to preserve.
A strange dessert
There was a ritual I watched as a child. A fight for sustenance, rooted in numbers tracing back centuries.
Sometimes I can still see him sitting at the head of the table, his thumb digging into a mandarin. I can still see the bright orange skin breaking, spraying a fine mist of citrus oil into the air. With one hand, he’d reach for a piece of bread, lay a mandarin wedge on top, and bite into it with what few teeth he had left.
Alfonso – Funzin’ – my grandfather – he must have been about seventy years old then. I can’t recall his exact age, but I remember his face clearly. He’d look down at me, not even a teenager yet, and murmur, “Want some dessert?” all while hissing a smile through his thick mustache.
That was his answer to my bewildered, what-are-you-doing-Grandpa? look. And, before taking his next bite, he’d go on telling not just a story, but his story.
Who would ever think that bread and citrus made for a dessert? But creativity took a different shape if you, like Funzin’, were born in the Italian South between two World Wars. This was the result of scarcity: desserts were simple, and for meals, meat was rarely an option. Luck placed it on the table maybe once a month, at most.
Three centuries of history come together
Centuries earlier, the math was strikingly similar. In early 1600s Naples – then the second-largest city in Europe – renting a basso (a windowless, one-room dwelling opening directly onto the street) cost around eleven ducats a year.
For a bank gatekeeper earning three ducats a month, the margin for survival was razor-thin. A single rotolo (~1kg) of veal cost roughly 0.3 ducats. Without getting lost in numbers and math, buying veal just once a week would mean spending over a third of his monthly salary on meat alone, guaranteeing bankruptcy overnight.
When I stumbled across those archival numbers, the three hundred years between Baroque Naples and my grandfather melted away.
Fundamentally, the situation in the South hadn’t changed. I realized my grandfather’s ritual wasn’t just a personal quirk: it was the continuation of a centuries-old instinct for survival and small joys. Suddenly, that piece of mandarin laid on stale bread didn’t just look like a childhood memory. It was a gateway into generations of history.
Finding the past through my novel
I would never have discovered this connection if it weren’t for my writing. The novel I am developing is set in Baroque Naples during the early 1600s. Choosing that setting wasn’t an accident; it stems from a persistent nostalgia that has walked with me every day since I left home in 2008 – a quiet, constant pinch in the back, reminding me of where I come from and who I am.
When people think of Baroque Naples, they think of dramatic paintings, the Counter-Reformation, and Caravaggio. I began looking at that era through Christopher R. Marshall’s Baroque Naples and the Industry of Painting, and it reinforced a simple truth: paintings are the photographs of the past. If you know how to read them, they reveal everything.
Take a 1660s still life by Giuseppe Recco, for example. It depicts shiny copper vessels overflowing with humble fish and squid. On the surface, it looks like a scene of simple, modest food – a quiet testament to nobility, wealth, and immense privilege.
But reality is depicted in the darkness slowly swallowing the edges of the canvas: the hands of those who hauled the squid from the bay, polished that copper, and brought them to the palaces for only a few ducats a month. A void that embraced the human conditions of a starving city, hampered by plagues, viceregal greed, and a poverty so absolute as to turn men into phantoms.
Distance has a way of revealing home
This research has been so impactful because it traces my own roots.
If you grow up in those places and never leave, it’s easy to take the world for granted. Everything around you feels entirely the same, and you can’t truly see who you are. I was ‘fortunate’ enough to leave, and I put ‘fortunate’ in quotes for a reason. I left to chase growth, and to seek an understanding of myself.
Writing is giving that to me. It brings me closer to home and unearths my roots. But when my fingers stop typing and I step away from the screen, I’m left thinking about the cost of what I left behind and the alternative life I could have lived.
That’s okay, though. Maybe my characters will live that life for me. They will stay there, among those same streets and familiar minds, drinking good wine, eating pasta and pizza, and fighting over a look that lingered a second too long.
An exercise in empathy
It isn’t just the setting I am seeking, though setting certainly matters. What I am really after is empathy.
My characters were real people, but imagining their lives is a challenge when our modern world looks so vastly different – when “Siri, turn off the TV” is a normal daily reality. Understanding historical details changes everything because human stakes were so raw. A man back then might fight, rob, or feign a terminal illness just to secure a single piece of veal for his family.
Discovering these visceral truths lets me build authentic characters and conflicts. It transforms historical research from a collection of facts into the very engine that makes characters feel desperate, complex, and real.
Seeing generations of sacrifice
When I think about how this has impacted me, outside of my writing, the first thing that comes to mind is my six-year-old daughter.
She is living a completely different life to the one I had growing up near Naples, the one my parents lived in the periphery, or the one my grandparents endured. I flew to New York City in search of professional opportunities; I didn’t embark on a month-long journey across the Atlantic on a steamship as my grandaunt did in the 1920s. I never had to dilute olive oil with water to stretch inventory and sell a little more, as my father was forced to do after losing his parents and older brother when he was young. Nor did I have to hide paper lira in my socks like my grandfather, saving every note just to buy used textbooks so my mother could study and graduate in pedagogy – the first in our family to ever earn a degree.
Seeing my daughter grow up in such a different world makes me acutely aware of these generational sacrifices. It deepens my gratitude for the path they cleared, and it reminds me that while the setting of our lives changes, the debt of love and resilience we owe to those who came before us stays the same.
Start with your roots
Every time I sit at my desk, every time my hands doubt the next words or scene, every time I fear the page is growing too cold or too distant, I go back to those crumbs soaked in citrus, to my grandfather’s proud smile. Because that is my moment, the one I lived, the one I am privileged enough to have witnessed. They are mine; they are my roots.
Returning to your roots is my very simple advice for other writers. Begin with your own breadcrumb, with what is yours, and only yours.
You know the specific smells, the quiet corners, the exact crack in your grandmother’s wardrobe where she hid money and candies, or the chaotic buzz of local kids outside your window arguing over a summer crush.
I believe these are the stories readers are truly hungry for. They are filled with the kind of intimate, living details that are so authentic that they can’t be generated on a screen or found in a standard textbook. No one else has lived them, and no one else can see them through your eyes.
As writers, we have a responsibility – arguably even an obligation – to preserve those details and share them with the world. Not just for our readers, but especially for our children, so they know where they come from.
Gerardo Manzo was born in Naples, grew up among its streets, churches, and stories, and left in 2008 — first to Rome, then Chicago, then New York City, where he now lives. Distance, as it turns out, was what it took to truly see home. He holds a PhD and has a background in academic research, skills he now puts to work uncovering the hidden lives of Baroque Naples for his debut novel, The Sibyl, set in the early 1600s. He created The Historical Novelist to share what that research reveals. You can also follow his journey on Instagram or his website.
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