One hundred twenty-three years ago this month, my grandfather, Pasquale Serafini, was born in the Italian hill town of Atessa, an ancient village set on a crag above the Adriatic, in Abruzzo.

He left Atessa for America at the age of 18, became a tailor and shop owner in New Hampshire, and died there in 1960.

In all his 81 years of life he never went back to his birthplace. Neither did his American-born son or daughter -- my Uncle Enzo (for Fiorenzo), and my mother, the former (let this roll off your tongue) Elvira Lucia Filomena Serafini.

Enzo corresponded with Atessan officials in search of his family's birth and marriage records. But he died in 1975 without ever setting foot on Italian soil.

My mother had been to Italy many times while teaching bridge on cruise ships. But she never found the time, or a willing companion, to seek out the place where her father grew up.

She was 88 years old last year, recently widowed and living in a retirement community in Catonsville when my wife, Christy, and I began talking about going off in search of Atessa. We assumed we would be making the trip as her proxies. I should have known better.

"Let's go!" my mother said.

Atessa is too small to appear on most maps. All we had to guide us there, at first, was a letter, written in my grandfather's graceful hand and cryptic spelling. He had all the formal education Atessa could offer -- six years -- and he wrote phonetically the way he spoke, in a heavily accented English.

Far back as I can remember, I thing I must af been 5 yers of age, wee live in Atessa ... Provincio Chieti; nella strada delle Monache (Monache mins Noons) that name bicouse a convent of nons woose locate thar. The ouse woose a brik and ston ...

The letter provided hints about where they lived in Atessa, but nothing so precise as an address, or a detailed description of the house.

I remember my grandfather's visits to our home in New Jersey when I was a child. And I can recall summers at his home in Hanover, N.H., where in 1907 he had established Serry's, a custom clothing store on Main Street, near Dartmouth College.

But a series of strokes soon after his retirement left him feeble in his final years. He was hard to understand, and a bit scary to me as a little kid. I was 12 when he died.

More than 40 years later an Internet search turned up Web sites for Chieti Province and Atessa, with photos, a rough map and lists of hotels and restaurants.

I learned that, sometime in the legendary past, Atessa was two towns -- Ate and Tixa -- separated by the Sangro river valley, where there lived a terrible dragon.

The townspeople appeased the dragon by sacrificing their goats and cows to his ravenous appetite. It was only through the intervention of San Leucio, who slew the dragon, that their livestock were finally spared, and the two towns were united as Atessa.

In gratitude, the town built a church, the Chiesa di San Leucio, which still preserves the dragon's rib (now thought to be the fossil rib of a mammoth).

San Leucio today is one of 11 churches that serve Atessa's 10,000 inhabitants, 6,000 fewer than in my grandfather's day.

Pasquale was the youngest of four children born after the deaths of three older siblings in a diphtheria epidemic.

His father, Olindo Serafini, was a tailor, and the agent in Atessa and 36 other towns for the Singer sewing machine company. "They would get a Singer sewing machine from America, and they would have to put it on a donkey to deliver it," my mother said.

Pasquale left Atessa in 1897 to escort his oldest brother's wife and children to America. In Philadelphia, he met and married Anita de Angelis, who at age 5 or 6 had immigrated with her family from Bari, in southern Italy.

He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1904. His citizenship papers hang on a wall in my house, as does the big 46-star American flag he flew proudly in front of his home in Hanover.

"He had such a sunny disposition," Mom recalled. The friendliness of customers, which his wife might read as condescension, he invariably accepted as genuine. The college boys who worked for him, and who often shared Sunday pasta dinners in his home, called him "Serry." The nickname stuck -- to him, my uncle and my mother.

Mom inherited Pasquale's love of life. But Christy and I had nagging doubts about touring Italy with two elderly ladies. (Christy's mother, Helen Trageser, 74, was joining our expedition). Italy can be brutally hot in summer. And a land of cobblestones, ruins and hills could be treacherous for anyone with uncertain balance.

And what could we expect to find in Atessa? We knew of no relatives there, and our inability to speak or read Italian would surely frustrate any serious search for family. We also worried that we would exhaust our mothers before our Alitalia package tour even got us to Florence and Venice.

In the end, knowing that we would blunt our chances for a discovery, or a surprise reunion, we sided with caution. We resolved to launch a lightning strike on Atessa, then return to our hotel in Rome all in one day.

If any great-grandmothers could pull it off, it would be these two. As she nears 90, my mother is still sharp, still ramrod-straight and eager to travel. She and her second husband, Richard Naugle, circled the world each winter for many years, teaching bridge on the Queen Elizabeth II. She still teaches bridge at the Charlestown Retirement Com-munity in Catonsville.

Christy's mom, Helen ("Boom Boom" to her grandkids), raised six children on her own while running a department store in Erie, Pa. And during the last 15 years she has gamely joined us on three cross-country camping trips, sleeping in a tent.

After a seven-hour overnight flight, we arrived in Rome.

My mother had been there on her bridge cruises. But the rest of us were greenhorns. We plunged into the ancient capital during the morning rush hour and were swallowed up by a beautiful, tumultuous city.

Rome was noisy and hot, steeping in smoggy sunshine. The streets were thick with tour buses, Fiats and motorbikes winding around and through the historic ruins and monuments that seemed to pop up at nearly every turn.

Rome's medieval street plan, with odd angles and narrow lanes, offers the pedestrian oases of shade, and hides delightful piazzas, shops and cafes. But they beggar a motorist's sense of direction, and my confidence about driving us safely out of the city, to Atessa, and back, was shaken.

We checked into the Hotel Portamaggiore, on a broad piazza across from one of Rome's old city gates. It is a "three-star" hotel -- code, we decided, for small, affordable and clean, and converted to accommodate Ameri-cans' insistence on private baths, but with no understanding of the concept of shower curtains.

We had worried that our almost total ignorance of Italian would be a problem. My mother, like many immigrants' children, never learned it at home.

"My father's Italian was quite good," she said. "The Dartmouth professors would come by the store to speak with him." But her mother was a tot when she landed in America. Her first language was really English, and she spoke Italian reluctantly.

"Father always said, 'We should speak Italian in the home so the children will learn it,' " Mom said. "I'm sorry my father didn't prevail."

Our attempted Italian was met invariably by patient Romans speaking serviceable English, though this would be less frequently the case in the countryside.

It was the concierge at the Portamaggiore who got on the telephone and found us a rental car. A comfortable, if underpowered, Korean-built Daewoo was delivered to the hotel at 9 a.m. the next day. And soon, with Christy navigating bravely beside me, the two moms in back, we were darting through Roman traffic.

I was not as panicked as I had been the summer before, driving on the "wrong" side of the roads in Ireland. But the unfamiliar car, the rush of traffic, the diabolical street plan and the mystery of street signs in Italian made for high anxiety.

Fortunately, the winding route through town to the Italian autostrada -- Italy's equivalent of our interstates -- was well-marked. Like a cork in a rushing river, we were soon bobbing in traffic, headed east, out of town.

We climbed into the hills, past woodlands, pastures and olive groves, and valley floors planted in small grains and corn. There were large villas, some in ruins, and medieval towns perched on impossibly steep, sunny hilltops, each crowned by a church.

The highway plunged through mountains in a dozen tunnels, and bent around others on graceful viaducts. High in the Apennines, the air became cooler and sweet, the landscape grew larger, the mountains more barren and marble-gray.

Americans tend to think of Europe as a compact place of crowded cities and miniature, Christmas-garden villages. But I keep encountering vistas -- in Austria, Switzerland and now Italy -- every bit as vast, sweeping and silent as parts of the American West.

As we drove and admired the view, none of us knew what the day would bring. Every road sign, every stop to eat, to buy water or a soda, or to use the facilities, posed challenges. Could we make ourselves understood? Were we doing something incorrectly, or inappropriately? How do you flush this thing?

Yet somehow, through all this, my mother seemed calm and content.

"In Hanover, everyone was different from me," she would tell me later. "They were all blond and blue-eyed." She was dark-haired, brown-eyed and olive-skinned -- always the immigrant's kid. Her best friend told her that Italian men were "the guys who sell bananas."

But here in Italy, amid the music of a language she could not understand, she felt at home -- with people who looked like her, surrounded by a history that was her own. "My cousin Eda always told me," my Mom recalled, " 'You won't appreciate your heritage until you go to Italy.' "

About 2 1/2 hours after leaving Rome, we spied the blue Adriatic. The autostrada descended and arced southward along the coast south of Pescara. To our left we could see sunny seaside communities with red-tile roofs crowding the beaches. We pressed on.

At our exit, Val de Sangro, we paid the $9 toll by sliding our VISA card into a machine at the tollgate. In two or three seconds, the gizmo spat back the card, and squawked a tinny, robotic arrivederci.

Following the river inland, we passed through fields of grapes, corn and what looked like tobacco. About eight miles up the valley, we spied Atessa on a hilltop to the southwest.

Unlike many hill towns we had seen, Atessa seemed alive. The medieval village was flanked by newer structures spilling down into the valley. There were small factories, apartment buildings, a parking garage, gas stations and shops.

My first impulse was to drive right up to the old part of town. I downshifted and turned on every street that seemed to lead us higher. I had no idea where I was going, or what we wanted to see. I just wanted to minimize the walking our mothers would have to do.

The higher we got, the narrower and more confusing the streets became. In minutes I had wedged the car into a lane where moving forward risked scraping off both side-view mirrors. We backed down and turned around. In seconds, we were in a steep descent, back to the bottom of the hill. Clearly, my American compulsion to see the world through a windshield would not do. This place evolved for pedestrians and donkeys, not cars.

We made our way back to a small inn we had noticed on our ascent, parked and regrouped in the inn's cool, dark and empty dining room.

It was early Saturday afternoon, and hot. There were few people on the streets, and no paying customers but us in the Ristorante Il Mulino -- the Mill. The proprietor was a stocky, gracious man who could make little sense of our pitiful Italian, but we reached a simple bargain: He would bring food; we would eat it.

First, white wine and beer to slake our thirst, followed by a salad, with greens and tomatoes so fresh they must have been picked as we sipped our drinks. Next, bowls of steaming pasta and tomato sauce, all overflowing with mussels, calamari and langostinos.

Inevitably, just as we had finished stuffing ourselves, our host arrived with a silver platter laden with the main course -- five beautiful, steaming grilled fish, heads and all. "Cefalo," he called them -- rockfish. They were delicious, and we nearly polished them off.

As we ate, we told our host as best we could why we had come to Atessa. He listened patiently, and seemed to grasp our purpose. He even acknowledged that Serafini was a local surname. But he had no long-lost cousins to offer us.

As we were leaving, he handed me a detailed town map, the first I had ever seen. We scoured it for street names or sites that matched places mentioned in Pasquale's letter:

"... at age of 7 years we muve in a beter location about 2-block away ... woose in hier alevation in a good size square wee coled Castello ... "

The old part of Atessa sits on a long, narrow ridge shaped like the deck of a ship. Near the "bow," in the higher end of town, our map showed a small piazza, in front of a church, labeled "Largo Castello." With little else to go on, we decided to walk there.

In a small square somewhere "amidships" on the hill, at the intersection of Via Roma and Corso Vittorio Emanuele, we paused to rotate our map. We were debating which way to walk when a young man approached.

"Is there a problem?" he asked in English. Cautious, but grateful for an offer of help, we explained why we were there, and asked how to find the Piazza Largo Castello.

It was too much English, too fast, for our new friend. But he soon grasped our mission, and offered to guide us. As we walked, he introduced himself as Mario Fornarola.

In his mid-30s, we guessed, he worked at a local auto-parts factory and, this being Saturday, he had the afternoon free. Like the proprietor at Il Mulino, Mario recognized Serafini as a common local name, but he didn't seem to know anyone by that name, either.

We climbed narrow, stone-cobbled streets, past shaded alleys with steep steps, and across tiny squares flanked by public buildings. When residents emerged from their doorways, or peered from windows and balconies framed by flowers, Mario hailed them and introduced us as "three strangers" and one lost daughter of Atessa.

My mother seemed delighted. The place was much as she imagined it, she said. She could almost see her father, as a little boy, running home through the stone streets and narrow alleys, to help in his father's sewing machine store.

It was soon evident, though, that Atessa's steps were taxing Mom's endurance. I kicked myself for expecting so much of her. But she still seemed willing. So we moved on, more slowly now, with a steady hand for her to hold, and plenty of opportunities to catch her breath.

Helen was feeling the climb, too, but she said her sore knee, which we had feared might shorten our day, was fine.

Perhaps sensing our need to pause, Mario invited us into a small baroque chapel, the date 1576 inscribed above its doorway. It was built, he said, by a local family and remained privately owned. Ornate and charming, its pale blue and gilt sanctuary housed a remarkable collection of religious relics, including human bones.

After a rest and another 20 minutes of walking, we reached the end of town and doubled back on the Via di Mezzo -- really no more than a wide sidewalk. Arm in arm, Mom and I slowly climbed more steps to a quiet landing where we found two elderly ladies sitting on their doorstep. Three younger women were settled on chairs across the way, amid red geraniums, chatting over their needlework.

We introduced ourselves, and felt welcome immediately. Our laughter and theirs soon echoed off the stone, brick and stucco.

With Mario interpreting, we explained that my mother was the child of a young Atessano who had gone to America at the turn of the last century. The ladies recognized the family name, and one, Milena Menna, assured us (as best we could make out her story) that her mother's father was a Serafini. She told us of a Serafini ancestor who had gone to America. But we found little else in her tale that matched our family's history.

"I doubted her story," Mom told me later. "I had the feeling she thought it would make me happy. But it was all right with me. She was so warm and friendly."

"Of course you are staying in Atessa tonight," one of the ladies said. No, we replied. We would have to drive back to Rome before nightfall. I felt hopelessly American -- on a tour schedule, in a hurry. We should have taken rooms at Il Mulino and paced ourselves more sensibly. A lesson learned.

At 4:20 p.m., church bells rang out, signaling the afternoon mass. One of the older women, whom we had thought too frail to stand by herself, leaped to her feet and scampered down the steps and out of sight.

We bid the ladies of Atessa arrivederci, and accepted their warm wishes for a safe return to Rome.

As we made our way back toward our starting place, Mario directed my wife, mother and mother-in-law on a more direct path down the hill. He led me along a higher, parallel lane, the Via della Vittoria, which led us into the Piazza Largo Castello.

I paused and snapped pictures of the small plaza, the plain stone church and a variety of houses. I focused on one that seemed to reflect my grand- father's description of one he had lived in.

The first floor, he had said, held a work room in front for his father's tailor shop, and a kitchen and dining room in back. The second floor had three large rooms:

"The front roome wee use as a sittine roome, the roome had 2 biuttiful balcony with franch dorers and outside biside a roome for flawor pot that mother kaptte all time, Woose planti room for 2 chares wich Pap use very often in the summer to smoke is long pipe."

It appeared that pictures and memories were all we would bring home. It was much more than anyone in our family had ever known of Atessa, yet I couldn't help wishing I had done more planning, more digging for connections.

My mother, though, seemed content to just brush by her father's ghost. "I would have loved to have seen his initials on a tree," she said. "But I didn't think we could have found out anything more if we had stayed. I was happy to see it."

By the time Mario and I rejoined the others, Mom was unable to walk any farther. Mario led me back to the lot where we had parked, then rode back with me to pick up my family.

Not content to send us on our way from there, he walked ahead of the car, leading us down, out of the maze of streets, until we came to an intersection I recognized.

Embarrassed to suggest it, but too grateful for his help not to, I offered to pay Mario for his time and efforts on our behalf. As I had feared, he looked wounded by the offer, and politely refused. Lamely, I promised to send copies of the photos I had taken.

The balance of our week's adventure took us by train to Florence, where we slowed our pace and learned to rest in the heat of the afternoon. In Venice, my mother was happy to glide past the sights by water, while Christy, Helen and I explored on foot.

When we return one day to Atessa, I promised myself, we will explore more carefully, eat more slowly, and stay longer to explore the town where Pasquale grew up, and where, as he assured us in his letter, "we woore quite happy."

When you go

Getting there: There are no direct flights from BWI to Rome. Try nonstop flights from Philadelphia. The best deals are usually packages with the Italian airline Alitalia (www.italiatourusa.com; 800-845-3365). Also try Gate1 Travel (800-682-3333; www.gate1travel.com). Prices fall sharply in autumn.

Lodging: It's hard to beat package deals. Choose from a variety of escorted, fly-and- drive or independent travel deals. On a budget? Three-star hotels may be quirky, but are reasonably priced; ours were clean and well-run.

Getting around: In the cities, walk or use taxis. Intercity trains are quick, clean and convenient. Seeking out ancestral villages may require a car. Rent as part of your package, or have your hotel set it up. Expect to pay two to three times U.S. prices for gasoline. Always fill the tank before you return the car. A good guide book is a must.

Roots travel: Gather information from family records, parents and grandparents. Search at www.google.com for any village, province or regional names you turn up. Many towns have Web sites with photos, maps and tourist information. When you arrive, slow down, and keep your schedule flexible.

Abruzzo: No Italian roots? Sink some in Abruzzo. Just a few hours from Rome, this region sees relatively few American tourists, yet offers beautiful mountain scenery, national parks, camping, seashore and ancient hill towns. Start at www.regione.abruzzo.it / turismo.

Tips: In cities, most Italians you'll encounter speak serviceable English. In the countryside, you'll need rudimentary Italian or a phrase book. Traveling with the elderly? Scale back your activities by half. Consider afternoon siestas. Take frequent breaks in shaded piazzas and cafes. Carry a first-aid kit and water. Beware uneven pavement.

-- Frank D. Roylance