My grandmother’s father was from Torremaggiore, and he was from Torremaggiore for his whole life. He was a tall, blonde man with blue eyes. His name was Salvatore, and he lived in a big, beautiful and ancient house in the centre of his small city. I remember when we visited him, every Sunday, with my grandfather and my grandmother. My grandfather, blessed soul, had a small, cyan car that he called “cecetta”, I do not know why. It was an old Fiat 850, already old when I was a kid. We used to go every Sunday with my grandfather in the countryside. My grandfather owned a small piece of land where he grow wheat and olive trees, and even some vineyards. A man called Michele used to take care of this land, and his wife was often doing homemade pasta for my family. Every Sunday we went there. I used to play with ants, while my grandmother wandered around to pick up wild greengroceries that she used to make a typical soup called Pancotto, and my grandfather used to sit on a beach chair next his car, listening football matches on his small transistors radio. At that time, transistor radios was a thing. When the sun was starting to go down, we used to visit my grandmother’s father. The city where he lived was not so far away from this small piece of land that my grandfather owned. When we was there, my grandmother’s mother used to give me a delicacy that always reminds me about my childhood: bread with oil and sugar. For them, sugar was still a luxury thing. They was people from two centuries ago.
The father of my Grandmother was a rich man. He owned the land. He had many lands, and many people that was working for him, and my grandmother often told me that when she was young they used to breed bunnies in their kitchen, in a cage, so they had meet quite often. They was rich enough to be able to buy ice in summer, from a man that was going around the city with a handcart to sell it.
The father of my Grandmother was a man from Torremaggiore. He discovered to be Italian only when the war, the big, first war came. As far as I know, he was rich enough to manage to avoid going to fight – and he spent the war years serving as a military in a city near his own. My other grand-grandfather, the father of my mother father, was not lucky enough, and he lost a finger throwing a grenade about Austro-Hungarian soldiers up in the north. Today, if you pass the Brenner, where the frontier is, you can see that Austrian people are quite like Italian people, and Italian people are quite like French people, and French people are quite like English people, and so on. Not at that time. At that time, the father of the father of my mother lost a finger throwing grenades to people that was just as he was. He did not know.
I do not know so much about the father of my mother’s father, not even his name. He died before that I was born. The only thing I know about him was that he was shaving with a hand razor, that the sister of my grandfather gave me when I was old enough to shave. I am still using it. It is in my luggage wherever I go. The mother of my grandfather lost her mind when I was three or four. I remember her like a fragile, perished bird, always sitting in the kitchen of my grandfather’s sister that was taking care of her. She was sitting there all day long, with a blanket on her knees and another blanket on her shoulders, with an electric heater near her feet, under the table. She was even eating like a bird, and the sister of my grandfather had to feed her with a spoon.
My grandmother is ten years older than my grandfather – that is why I have a more vivid memory of her parents. Her father was a man from Torremaggiore, and he was a man from Torremaggiore from his own life. If you asked him what he thought about people from San Severo, he would tell you that they are “treacherous and bad”. Torremaggiore is a city in south of Italy, and San Severo is in south of Italy as well. Those two cities are distant around five kilometres, and when I was young, I used to bike there, sometimes, with my dear friend Keaton. It did not take more than half an hour.
My grandmother was a woman from her province. She was born when Americans was bringing freedom in this old land from German Nazis. My grandfather, that was older, used to tell me stories about those Americans that was speaking Italian and giving him candies. Fascism made Italy a modern country, even in all their badness. There was, at that time, a tram that connected San Severo with Torremaggiore, and my grandmother was able, in that way, to come to study in San Severo, that was such a big city at that time, especially if compared with Torremaggiore. Foggia, the capital of the province, was for her a big metropolis, where she went only few times in her childhood and adolescence to buy fashion clothes in city centre boutiques. When she grew older, she went there to study how to become a teacher, and she lived there in a noun’s college. Today, travelling from Foggia to Torremaggiore does not take more than an hour – but at that time, she had to live there.
My grandmother was not allowed by her father to take care of her facial hairs, or wear makeup. When she married my grandfather, she found some kind of freedom that she could not imagine in her more traditional family. My grandfather was from San Severo, even if he was not “treacherous and bad”. His family, however, came from San Marco in Lamis, a small village – even smaller at that time – on the mountains nearby. My grandfather was not from that kind of squirearchy, although he had a good job in a bank – so he could marry my grandmother with not so many problems. When they married, my grandmother was finally able to take care of her appearances, and she is still a classy woman. When she had to start to work as a teacher, she had to ask permission to my grandfather. “Until you’ll be able to take care of our children, and to provide me warm lunch and dinner,” he said, “for me it’s ok”. It can seem a bad thing, today, but that happened in fifties, and in south of Italy, so it was a pretty open-minded answer by his side. This does not even mean that he did not love her. Years and years after, when he started to be sick, my grandmother went in her hometown to have a medical check-up, and she was supposed to pay a little fee to her doctor for that. Her doctor, that was not older than fifty and that know her family, didn’t want her to pay and said something like “well, don’t worry, go and buy an ice cream instead” – it was summer. When my grandmother told that story to her husband, he misunderstood and, thinking that she had an ice cream with that doctor, he sulks for days. He was eighty-five at that time, and even if this tale is a little bit weird, it testifies how much he still loved her.
However, as I said, my grandmother was a women that belonged to her province, and not even to that – her homeland was made by a bunch of cities in not more than hundred kilometres of radius from the city where she was born. Nowadays, she is travelling a lot, but for the biggest part of her life she was fine in her hundred kilometres world – and she still talks, amazed, about a single travel that she did in Venice with my grandfather, where he lost his hat from the top of a tower. She was born when ice, and even water, was sold by a man with a handcart. Nowadays, she uses planes, has a cell phone and can even use a computer. Still, if you ask her where she come from, she will answer that her homeland is that hundred kilometres located in North of Apulia, in the south of Italy – and she will add, maybe, a nice tale about her childhood there.
My mother is Italian. She has always been Italian. She even used to beat me with a wooden spoon when I was a kid, that kind of spoon that in Italy is used to make pasta. She liked to travel, but she never left Italy until recent times because, she said, it is useless to go to know the world if you do not even know your country. Her bigger adventure was that time that, with friends, she went in Sicily just to eat a special pastry called “Cannolo” that is made only there. The first time that she took the plane was to visit me in England, when I was living over there. When I moved there, she cried as if I was going to the gallows. The same happened when I moved in Sweden. It really doesn’t matter for her that it’s faster to go to Sweden with a Plane than to Milan with a bus – She belong to Italy, and those international distances confuses her. For her, a continent is a huge distance, and taking a plane is a big risk.
What should we think about that – we, which made of airport waiting rooms our own house?
When I was born, echoes of the fall of Berlin Wall was still vivid, shaking the whole continent. Schengen was already a thing, a wonderful and precious, fragile thing. That thing that allows me to pass the Brenner and go in Austria as my grandmother used to travel from her city to my city, with that tram. You can go there and meet those people, to whom my grandfather was throwing his grenades, and have a cigarette with them, and shake their hands.
When I was three, European Union became a thing. A wonderful and precious, fragile thing. A bunch of people that spent their history fighting each other at a certain point decided that it was stupid to fight with someone that is exactly as you are. Why was my grandfather throwing grenades to Austrian people, after all? Why was King Penda trying to set fire to Bamburgh, capital of the Northumbrian Kingdom? Why in 1255 Geneva and Venice fought against each other in the War of Saint Sabas? It is as foolish as that.
When I was eleven, even Euro became a thing, and I liked it because my grandfather gave me a bag full of the new coins that he had in his bank, and the January 1, 2011, I went with my Mother in Foggia, that same city where my grandmother used to buy her fancy dresses. There, in a mall, I bought a trading card game that I really wanted and it had a huge discount if you was going to pay it with the new currency.
If you ask me where I came from, I can reply you that I am European. I am European since when, touching train tracks in that abandoned piece of ground, full with brushwood, and dust, and scrap trains, near the station, where we used to play when I was a kid, I could feel in those tracks the blood of the whole Europe. I could touch in the same time Berlin, and Paris, and London, and Moscow, and even far away, through the Trans-Siberian Railway – the far scent of Beijing. Since then I took many trains, many ships, and many planes. If you want a Shepard’s pie you can easily fly to London and eat one – there is a pretty pub on Broadway, near the Saint James’s Park tube station that makes an amazing one. You can fly to London and eat a Cornish pastry in Covent Garden as easily as my Mother, years ago, went with her friends to eat a pastry in Sicily; as easily as my Grandmother used to take that tram to come in San Severo. It is not unthinkable to plan a Christmas break in Lappeenranta – and that is just because you can. All this is happening while, even one century ago, the father of my grandfather was throwing bomb to Austrian people, and that is how he lost a finger. There is enough to be overwhelmed. There is enough to be proud, and thankful.
Maurizio Fusillo, volunteer in Globala Kronoberg
Photos are in Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.