For ninety years these photographs have been in this frame. It hung for decades on a farmhouse wall. Parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins… my Bisnonna Cesca lovingly placing their photos all together after she got to Australia in 1934, while they remained in Italy, or went to America, Canada or other parts of Australia.
Given their stone houses had sat close in Italy, it must’ve felt so different for Cesca and Mico with their three children to be in an Australian timber house ‘on stumps’ amid orchards five miles from town. Loved ones once a short walk away in Italy, now in photographs, their conversations solely through letters.
As I seek out more about older family from my Calabria side, their surname meanings give little hints of lives once lived… Zappone – ‘worked the land’, Carrozza – ‘carriage driver’, Rizzitano – ‘curly haired’ (wish I’d inherited that!), or Solano – ‘facing the sun’. I love that Nanna Francesca’s maiden name means ‘facing the sun’, as she so loved it’s light and warmth.
‘Il sole non si dimentica di un villaggio perché è piccolo’ – the sun doesn’t forget a village just because it’s small. Just as we hold onto that which might be humble yet significant, a connection to the past that persists for many of us, generations on, even as we speak with different accents in other places.
As if a hidden force keeps drawing us back, to a place we’ve never been, to reconnect with family we’ve never met, to cook the old, spoken recipes and to seek out the stories of those in the fading photos…
It’s taken me until aged fifty, to build and light a fire for the first time. Curiously, until now, it’s just so happened that the men in my life did this task. Whether it was Dad’s big, brick barbecue in the backyard (built by one of Nonno Anni’s Italian mates). The guys among friends building a bonfire on the beach. Or Roger taking care of the fire if we stayed somewhere cold that had a lovely fireplace. For whatever reasons, including living mostly in a subtropical climate, it just didn’t come about to light a fire myself.
Palmi, Calabria, deep in Italy’s south, where my Nanna Francesca was born. So many people warned me off going here, telling me it was too dangerous – including my own grandparents! But I’m eternally grateful Roger and I didn’t heed the warnings. For me, I think the pull of seeing the place of my Solano, Carrozza, Misale and Rizzitano ancestors was too great.
Vale to my great-aunt, Nancy, Nanna Francesca’s sister. In Mezza Italiana, I wrote about when she was born in Stanthorpe in the 1930s and her parents named her Soccorsa, they hadn’t even left the hospital when the nurses, adamant Soccorsa was too hard to say, called her, ‘Nancy’, a name that was to stick for life.
Zoë Boccabella 