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…
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.
Another piece from my Italian great-grandmother, Bisnonna Francesca’s glory box… (Cesca in my books). This hand-embroidered pillow sham from 1920s Calabria travelled in the hull of a ship across the world to a new life in Australia and remained tucked away for many decades… a keepsake of another place and life that might have been.
Costa Viola…the Violet Coast of west Calabria (when I took this the violet colour of melding sea and sky seemed even more vibrant in reality).
I first learnt of this town when reading Old Calabria by Norman Douglas (published 1915), and on the map it looked a good halfway point to stay between Palmi and Pompeii. This part of the old town reminded me of some of the lanes in Fossa, (not so the 40 degree heat at the time) and even though it appears not to have changed much over the years, the town was quite different to the one Douglas had encountered about a century before when brigands were still imprisoned in the castle.
Zoë Boccabella 