Part 2 – Il grande viaggio 1975… 50 years since Nanna Francesca and Nonno Anni took their ‘big trip’ overseas.
For this instalment, one photograph stands out – when Nonno Anni returns to Fossa more than three decades after emigrating to Australia. I wrote about this in Joe’s Fruit Shop and Milk Bar, in the chapter ‘Orange Drink – 6d’ and looking at this photograph again now, it takes me right back to sitting at the kitchen table when Nonno Anni handed me this picture and spoke of returning to his beloved Fossa for that first time. I can still smell the brewed coffee, feel the biscuit crumbs on the tablecloth, and see the tears in his eyes…
‘It seemed the entire village came out into the street when we arrived in Fossa,’ Nonno Anni shakes his head, marvelling. And having stood in that lane, I can almost hear the clunking open of shutters and doors, footsteps on stone.
He shows me a photograph of the return – Nonno Anni in his travelling suit, kneeling on the cobblestones surrounded by dozens of villagers clustered around him, many reaching out with a hand on his shoulders, his arms, his back. The emotion in his face is pure. They never forgot him, enveloping him back into their village family. Several decades of poverty, migration, and the war had forever split an entire village. A period short in historical terms but long for those living through it, and everlasting in that there would forever be those who went beyond the mountains and those who stayed encircled by them.
The younger people in the photograph must’ve been thinking, ‘who are these people?’ but it’s clear the older people knew. It’s lovely how they embraced Nanna Francesca also, though she wasn’t from Fossa or Abruzzo. Of course, she too was very keen to see her family house again in Calabria, but that is in the next part of their travels… Buon Viaggio! 💛🌠
It is fifteen years since the 6.3-magnitude earthquake that struck Abruzzo at 3.32am on 6 April 2009, taking the lives of 309 people and leaving 70,000 homeless in around fifty-six towns. My heart is with those who lost so much… the victims, their loved ones, all those who were displaced, the many still working hard to recover and rebuild in the long years following.
Zoë Boccabella 