Hello everyone, ciao tutti! Wishing you all a very happy Christmas and new year! Thank you for joining me here this past year. 💛
I went to the old box of photos to find a Christmassy one and came across this 1960s photograph of Nanna Francesca and Nonno Anni about to head out to a dinner dance (at Cloudland’s ballroom). It shows their Christmas tree I know from my ‘70s childhood, the ‘good cabinet’ that was lost in the flood and their 1930s clock that now sits on the ‘good cabinet’ in my living room. 😊
Nonno Anni wasn’t often in a suit. When I’d stay over, I remember him mostly in a pair of King Gees and a navy singlet working out in the backyard or maintaining the flats. And while Nanna Francesca always wore dresses, they were usually ‘house ones’. Her evening dress was likely made by her friend the dressmaker, an Italian lady a few streets away in New Farm.
Nanna and I would sometimes walk together to her house with its lovely flower garden out front. While a fitting was done and the two women chatted away in Italian, I’d sit on the plastic-covered couch with some dry, Italian biscuits I’d been given as a rerun of an old movie like Ben-Hur blared from the tv set. I’d felt a bit bored at the time but now I’m really grateful these little vignettes were part of my childhood.
Nanna Francesca’s pearls weren’t real, despite all the years my grandparents worked so hard during, days, nights and weekends on the farm, at the Astoria Café and in their milk bar. That sort of thing didn’t matter to her or Nonno Anni. As long as there was plenty of food in the house, a chair for each of us to sit on and we were all together, that’s all that was needed to count.
There’s an Italian saying, l’amore si misura in piatti cucinati – love is measured in cooked dishes and Nanna Francesca certainly showed us her love in the Christmas eve dinners she’d spend all day preparing for us including fish, of course, zippuli and pasta with no meat in the passata in the Italian tradition of no meat the night before Christmas.
I’d do anything to sit down again for one of those epic meals all together (even the baccalà I couldn’t stand the smell of!) 😄 Yet, while those times are now a beautiful memory, the love Nonno and Nanna gave me still feels close. As well as their example that you don’t need a lot of extra things to find a little happiness. Whatever this time of year may be for you, may the coming year bring a little happiness, and peace. Buon Natale. Zoe x 🌠
Would you book a trip with this travel guide?! 😄 It’s the 1970s, I’m about six, tooth missing and have been raiding the ‘dress up box’ again. (Dad had these posters for his Italian night class he taught.) Who’d have thought I’d end up in Calabria myself one day seeing Nanna Francesca’s birth town or that I’d even write about it.
Tonight is Epiphany Eve and in Italy many children will be waiting to see what they receive from La Befana, ‘the witch’ – sweets if they’ve been good, coal if they’ve been naughty. As I wrote in, Mezza Italiana, I was chosen as La Befana for my school play, being ‘an Italian kid’, and as you can see from the first photo, I wasn’t too thrilled about it! 😄 Although, I’d warmed up to the idea by the second photo when I got to climb through a window. (As you can also see, being summer, I’m already a bit burnt from swimming at the local pool!)
Today’s the day! 
I have this one treasured photo with three generations of the Boccabella men in my life – Dad, Nonno Anni, Bisnonno Vitale (and my zio).
My Bisnonna, Granny Maddalena’s birthday was today and by complete coincidence, this morning I was talking to one of her relatives in Italy of her stories that I’m writing about. Like many of her era, Maddalena’s life was shaped by hard-earned experience as she lived through two wars, an earthquake, a pandemic, the depression and bringing up her sons single-handedly before she could join her husband in Australia.
I’m so thrilled that, 
Polpette and peas in gravy, such an ‘Australitaliano’ combination – meatballs and peas in tomato sauce. Comfort food at its best. Nanna Francesca cooked this a lot (and when I was a kid, I found it a bit confusing that, being southern Italian, she called the tomato passata or sugo – ‘gravy’ considering my Australian Mum called gravy a deep-brown liquid accompanying a roast). Nanna Francesca would’ve been 95 today so it seems fitting to cook her polpette e piselli in gravy. We always celebrated her birthday on the 12th, the day she was born though the official date on her birth certificate was the 19th (lodged late as her parents argued who to name her after). Tradition won, as did her father, and being the first-born, Francesca was named after her paternal grandmother.
Thinking of all those volunteering and working over this time when many get to take a break. It still amazes me how my grandparents opened their milk bar and fruit shop 7 days a week from early morning ‘til late at night with only two days a year off – for 20 years straight! And then ‘scaled back’ to 5 days a week for the following years.
Happy 80th Birthday to my great uncle, Vince. Lovely to celebrate this milestone with him on the weekend. To me, he’s always been a gentle soul and am so glad we’ve stayed close.
Zoë Boccabella 