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The Roseto Mystery

“these people were dying of old age. That’s it.”

out·li·er \-

'

lı-(- e)r\ noun

1: something that is situated away from or classed differently

from a main or related body

2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in

value from the others of the sample

1 .

Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of

Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of

Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized

around a large central square. Facing the square is the

Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once

the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side

leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine — Our Lady

of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside,

fl anked by closely clustered two-story stone houses

with red-tile roofs.

For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the

marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the

fi elds in the terraced valley below, walking four and fi ve

miles down the mountain in the morning and then making

the long journey back up the hill at night. Life was

hard. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately

poor and without much hope for economic betterment

until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth

century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.

In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans — ten

men and one boy — set sail for New York. They spent

their fi rst night in America sleeping on the fl oor of a tavern

on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan’s Little Italy. Then

they ventured west, eventually fi nding jobs in a slate

quarry ninety miles west of the city near the town of Bangor,

Pennsylvania. The following year, fi fteen Rosetans

left Italy for America, and several members of that group

ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in

the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word

back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and

soon one group of Rosetans after another packed their

bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream

of immigrants became a fl ood. In 1894 alone, some twelve

hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leaving

entire streets of their old village abandoned.

The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside

connected to Bangor by a steep, rutted wagon path. They

built closely clustered two-story stone houses with slate

roofs on narrow streets running up and down the hillside.

They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel

and named the main street, on which it stood, Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unifi cation. In

the beginning, they called their town New Italy. But they

soon changed it to Roseto, which seemed only appropriate

given that almost all of them had come from the same

village in Italy.

In 1896, a dynamic young priest by the name of Father

Pasquale de Nisco took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized

festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land

and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons, and fruit trees

in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out

seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans

began raising pigs in their backyards and growing grapes

for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent, and a

cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants

and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More

than a dozen factories sprang up making blouses for the

garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh

and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly

German, which meant — given the fractious relationships

between the English and Germans and Italians in those

years — that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans. If you

had wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania

in the fi rst few decades after 1900, you would

have heard only Italian, and not just any Italian but the

precise southern Foggian dialect spoken back in the Italian

Roseto. Roseto, Pennsylvania, was its own tiny, selfsuffi

cient world — all but unknown by the society around

it — and it might well have remained so but for a man

named Stewart Wolf.

Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the

stomach and taught in the medical school at the University

of Oklahoma. He spent his summers on a farm in

Pennsylvania, not far from Roseto — although that, of

course, didn’t mean much, since Roseto was so much in

its own world that it was possible to live in the next town

and never know much about it. “One of the times when

we were up there for the summer — this would have been

in the late nineteen fi fties — I was invited to give a talk

at the local medical society,” Wolf said years later in an

interview. “After the talk was over, one of the local doctors

invited me to have a beer. And while we were having

a drink, he said, ‘You know, I’ve been practicing for seventeen

years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely fi nd

anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-fi ve with heart

disease.’ ”

Wolf was taken aback. This was the 1950s, years before

the advent of cholesterol-lowering drugs and aggressive

measures to prevent heart disease. Heart attacks were an

epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause

of death in men under the age of sixty-fi ve. It was impossible

to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart

disease.

Wolf decided to investigate. He enlisted the support

of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma.

They gathered together the death certifi cates from residents

of the town, going back as many years as they could.

They analyzed physicians’ records. They took medical

histories and constructed family genealogies. “We got

busy,” Wolf said. “We decided to do a preliminary study.

We started in nineteen sixty-one. The mayor said, ‘All my

sisters are going to help you.’ He had four sisters. He said,

‘You can have the town council room.’ I said, ‘Where are

you going to have council meetings?’ He said, ‘Well, we’ll

postpone them for a while.’ The ladies would bring us

lunch. We had little booths where we could take blood, do

EKGs. We were there for four weeks. Then I talked with

the authorities. They gave us the school for the summer.

We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested.”

The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no

one under fi fty-fi ve had died of a heart attack or showed

any signs of heart disease. For men over sixty-fi ve, the

death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half

that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from

all causes in Roseto, in fact, was 30 to 35 percent lower

than expected.

Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from

Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. “I hired medical

students and sociology grad students as interviewers,

and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to

every person aged twenty-one and over,” Bruhn remembers.

This happened more than fi fty years ago, but Bruhn

still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he described

what they found. “There was no suicide, no alcoholism,

no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have

anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They

didn’t have any of those either. These people were dying

of old age. That’s it.”

Wolf’s profession had a name for a place like Roseto — a

place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal

rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.