Tomie dePaola, the author of the children’s book Strega Nona and many others, died on March 30 at the age of 85. As a child, his were the only books that reflected my bittersweet experience of sharing a home with a nonna, an Italian grandmother. In our case, that nonna was also, like his most famous character, a strega - a witch. 

My grandmother, like Strega Nona, believed in potions, spells, and augury. She helped people in our neighborhood cure their worries through magic. She placed amulets under our crib mattresses for luck. And on a quiet, rolling boil fueled by the injustices she faced in her life, she made several projections that turned out to be true - that I would never dare reprint here. 

Strega Nona had complete control over her powers. They only ran amok in the hands of people who didn’t understand them - like when Big Anthony stole her magic pasta pot, and drowned the entire town in spaghetti - a town which dePaola created based on cityscapes of his (and my) ancestral Calabria. Perhaps sensing something of the Big Anthony in us, and understanding that her old-world cures have an ever-shrinking place in the new world, my grandmother never passed her secrets on to us. But when she died, in 1999, Strega Nona helped us find a way for our nonna to live on.

When she was young, my grandmother would walk 30 miles through the mountains to the beach on the Tyrrhenian Sea at Paola and visit the monastery of Saint Francis of Paola, the patron saint of Calabria. There she made a promise to the saint, asking for an intervention that remains lost, that she would return to Paola to pay tribute to him. But she left for America, and never returned. 

We took a Strega Nona doll on a family trip to Italy in 2001, and brought her to Paola to fulfill the terms of my grandmother’s bargain with a saint. We got funny looks as we walked around with this children’s toy stuck out of a backpack, or held tightly by grown women. But a nun walked up to us, as we held Strega Nona at the altar in the sanctuary, and tied a piece of black yarn, a cunnocchia e fusu, a sort of devotional belt, around the doll’s waist. 

Now, Strega Nona comes to every family party, and visits every newborn baby. It is because of Tomie dePaola that we can keep our nonna with us. In his books, he was able to capture poignant details of Italian-American life in a way that we saw nowhere else. In Watch Out for the Chicken Feet in Your Soup, dePaola confronts a neighborhood kid who thinks Joey’s grandmother’s cooking is strange, until he tastes it. There is also a recipe for the egg-filled, doll-shaped bread loaves we eat at Easter. And just like us, dePaola lived in a house where a nonna lived upstairs, who passes away; it is still hard for to me to read Nana Upstairs & Nana Downstairs. 

In 2006, I wrote an essay about our Strega Nona doll’s pilgrimage to Paola that appeared in a collection of essays by Italian-American authors. I sent a copy to dePaola and received in return a heartfelt note in his distinctive handwriting, which holds in it the same warm humor and faith in human nature as his drawings. 

I will cherish that note, and always cherish his voice. Today I will light a candle for Tomie dePaola, the writer of more than 260 books, the Newbury and Caldecott Honor Award winner, the Calabrese godfather to all of us who grew up with chicken feet in their soup and good witches watching over them.  –J