An incredible thing happened recently… I’m working on the next book, in particular, a part of it that’s an update on the internment camp Nonno Anni was in, when out-of-the-blue, I’m contacted by someone whose father was in the same camp. (The secret camp authorities said never existed, though any of us who had family in there know that’s not true.)
For privacy, I won’t say who contacted me but I’m so grateful as she also sent me photos I’ve never seen before from inside the camp, including of ‘Venice Street’ between their tents and also of Nonno Anni!
Then it struck me, here’s Nonno Anni aged nineteen, bottom right in the first photo holding up a forkful of pasta, and two decades on, there’s Dad aged nineteen, same position bottom right, also holding up pasta for a photo. (The same photo that’s on the cover of Mezza Italiana.)
What a difference twenty years after the camp made for Nonno Anni – married, a family, a house, a milk bar and fruit shop. And what a gift to discover more internment camp photos all these years after I wrote about it in, Joe’s Fruit Shop and Milk Bar. (It remains a mystery why or how photos were even taken inside the camp since by 1942 in WW2 cameras were confiscated from Italians in Australia. It seems the guards likely took them.)
Truly, the absolute best thing about writing is hearing from all of you and your own connections with these stories. Thank you. I better get back to work as I’m deep in the next book but I just had to share with you this little bit of ‘serendipity with spaghetti’. 💛
Today’s the day! 
It’s Nonno Anni’s birthday in a few days so there was once a time when all the family would be getting together this weekend at my grandparents’ house. Several tables would be pushed together, Nanna Francesca would cook huge bowls of pasta and either polpette or cotolette, and of course there’d be cake, champagne and maybe Franjelico, or Sambuca with a coffee bean lit on top.
This is one of the first photographs I chose that I hoped would make the cover of Mezza Italiana (it’s on the back). Taken in the 1960s, it was dinner for my uncle’s birthday and one of the rare times the family got to eat together since one of my grandparents were usually doing a shift at their milk bar.
Swiss Italian, Aquilino Tinetti originally built this stone farmhouse at Shepherds Flat in central Victoria circa 1860. He and his wife Maria had thirteen children and the 100 acres were run as a dairy farm for the next 120 years.
Zoë Boccabella 