When Can You Come Home Again?
On Cinema Paradiso and Homecomings
When I was 11, I watched Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 film Cinema Paradiso. In it, Salvatore, a celebrated film director played by Jacques Perrin, returns to Giancaldo, the small Sicilian town where he was born. He must pay his respects to Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), the former projectionist in Giancaldo’s only movie theater, who has died. When Salvatore was eight, Alfredo became his mentor, introducing him to the magic of the silver screen and helping him weather the trials and heartaches of growing up in post-World War II Italy. The film is a poignant and nostalgic coming-of-age tale, switching between Salvatore’s past and his homecoming after decades spent away.
When Cinema Paradiso came out, I was the one who suggested my mom and I watch it after reading a rave review in our local paper in Venezuela. The film jumpstarted my double love affair with indie filmmaking and film criticism, and its scenes come back to me often, even though I haven’t seen it in decades. Before Salvatore leaves Giancaldo for the bigger and the better as a young man, Alfredo (I think it was him, but I’m not certain), gives him pertinent advice about coming home. He tells Salvatore that if he comes back too soon, everything will look like it has changed, but if he stays away for a long time, everything will look the same. I moved away from my hometown at 16 (five years after watching the film), and I’ve been mulling over Cinema Paradiso’s philosophy on homecomings ever since.
This is not a post about my return to Caracas. Due to uncannily convoluted geopolitical reasons, I haven’t been home since 2016, and I have no idea when I’ll be back. This is a post about returning to a different home—East Lansing, Michigan, where we lived for nine years, and where my youngest son Santiago was born. For Salvatore, Alfredo’s words held true. His return to Giancaldo after spending his whole adult life away is a return to his past. He finds his former self and Alfredo on every narrow street and inside every stone house. As promised, Giancaldo’s essence is the same, and it has preserved Salvatore and Alfredo within it. While mourning Alfredo and the mischievous inquisitiveness of his youth, though, Salvatore realizes he has changed in ways he doesn’t like.
Our family moved to East Lansing in 2013, when I was hired as an assistant professor at Michigan State University’s Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures. Our eldest son William was a year and a half when we began our life there. A year later I had Santiago. Like Salvatore, our boys spent a magical childhood in a charming town. One of the joys of academia is that you’re surrounded by people who are knowledgeable and passionate about their areas of study—and they tend to raise knowledgeable and passionate children. In East Lansing, we had friends my husband Nate and I loved, whose children our children loved, and vice versa. Our boys could walk to their elementary school, and they adored their teachers and classmates. They shared a bunk bed and would whisper and laugh long into the night.
Then in February of 2022, I found out I’d gotten my dream job in our dream city at the University of Pittsburgh. When we told the boys we were moving, they were understandably devastated. No promise of great things to come in Pittsburgh could assuage their anguish. The only thing that eased the pain (a little) was our promise to visit East Lansing the following summer. And so we returned a year later, and as Alfredo had cautioned, it was too early. Not in the way he predicted, however.
I understand Cinema Paradiso’s take on homecoming as a warning that if you haven’t matured enough to see past superficial variations like new restaurants and closed-down businesses, you will fixate on them and feel like your home is unrecognizable and you no longer belong. If you stay away long enough, though, you’ll learn to take in the whole essence, to realize that small fluctuations are normal and don’t erase you or those you loved from the place you once called home. When we went back to East Lansing in 2023, we’d barely made sense of our lives in Pittsburgh, and as a result being in our old home affected us in surreal ways. We desperately longed to yet again have a geographic closeness with our beloved East Lansing friends. We couldn’t stop comparing our current and former lives as we went from one place to the next. Weirdest of all, as we drove by our old house, I forgot we didn’t live there anymore, and I found myself back in time, ready to open the door and join a version of ourselves that never came to be. It was a short-lived hallucination, but a spooky one.
We left East Lansing after that visit thinking we shouldn’t go back for a long time. It was too hard to detach from our past and assert our new selves when we were there. Then, Santiago started participating in Odyssey of the Mind (you can learn all about that amazing organization below), and it turned out that Odyssey’s World Finals are held at Michigan State every two years. Since his team qualified, we drove back to East Lansing this past May. We hadn’t spent decades away like Salvatore, but we’d set down roots and made sense of our identity in Pittsburgh. We now have friends we love and a house we’re crazy about, and a sense (finally) that East Lansing was a beautiful chapter of our lives—but only a chapter.
We juggled World Finals activities with seeing the people and places that mean so much to us. This time there was no confusion between our various selves. This time the break was clean, and nostalgia was unthreatening and welcome. Unlike Salvatore, who was back to bid farewell to the dead man who changed his life, we were back to revisit vibrant, timeless friendships that have grown richer with time and fonder with distance.
At the end of Cinema Paradiso, Salvatore figures out that he has cut his life off from the people that gave it meaning and has been unable to connect with anyone like he did with Alfredo. Yes, he has made transcendent art, but he’s also betrayed his young self and those who believed in him. On the other hand, Nate, the boys, and I figured out that we lost the home but not the people who made it worth it to live there. And if Santiago and his Odyssey of the Mind team make it to the World Finals, we’ll be back in 2027, eager and ready to see everyone again.
To learn about the joys of Odyssey of the Mind, watch this account of Team Wyland’s journey this year:
Stories that Transfixed Me (and May Transfix You)
Your Turn
Have you seen Cinema Paradiso? Do you agree with their philosophy on homecoming? Have you struggled with moving away? What’s it like to return to places you once called home?
one of the all time great films. as Dorothy learns home is where the heart is and clicking ones heels helps
Beautiful piece, Alexandra, it really touched me. Wishing you well at Pitt. I have friends at the University and my father's family is from near the city. Though I never lived there, family visits as a child carved out a a magical place for it in my memory. Be well!