Today is my personal remembrance day. Let’s celebrate our memories together! Although, I have to confess, some of the memories I am honouring today are not, strictly speaking, mine. They are family stories that have been passed on to me by older relatives, some of whom I have never even met.

I am very lucky in that many in my family have been bitten by the personal history bug. And none more so than my maternal great-great-grandfather, Ferdinando, who was a prolific diarist. Most of his notes were written on the back of performance review forms—which, it seems, were already a useless piece of corporate red tape back in the 19th century. There, he scribbled notes about his own and his wife’s family, some of which he specifically addressed to ‘i posteri’, his descendants—I guess he knew that sooner or later his papers would make their way to someone like me.

Ferdinando had been a ‘mediocre soldier’ (his words) and a fencing master. He loved fencing, but gave it up because his wife nagged him to get a better job. Throughout his life, however, he remained enthralled by swashbuckling adventures, which he captured in his writing. He was particularly in awe of his father in law, Giovanni Infusini, who had been a soldier in the Bourbon army and had run many dangerous missions against the Italian army led by Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Here is a bit of Italian history for you: Bourbon king Francis II ruled over southern Italy in the second half of the 19th century. At the time, the country was broken up in a number of small states and was rife with patriots wanting to unify it under the rule of the King of Piedmont and Sardinia, whom they perceived as the only authentically independent and genuinely Italian monarch. The most prominent leader of the unification movement was Giuseppe Garibaldi, a valiant soldier who had already been instrumental in leading Uruguay to independence. After northern Italy’s city states fell into Piedmontese hands, only the South and Rome remained on the path of an Italian nation. Garibaldi decided to take matters in his own hands in 1860, when he land a thousand volunteers invaded Sicily, which was part of the Bourbon kingdom. Despite being outnumbered, the Thousand swept through the island and landed in Calabria. His effort found local support and some Bourbon soldiers even deserted and joined Garibaldi’s army. As Garibaldi advanced, the Bourbon king, Francis II, sought refuge in the fortress of Gaeta. Giovanni Infusini fought for his king until the Bourbon troops were defeated and the king fled in exile.

Unsurprisingly, Garibaldi, who is deemed a hero in Italy, was considered pure evil in my great-great-grandmother’s Bourbon-supporting family. After he won the battle of the Volturnus, he was quartered in my great-great-great-grandfather Infusini home, as befits a victorious general. There, he picked up my great-great-grandmother, Angela, who was a particularly pretty little girl with big black eyes. Angela was so scared of Garibaldi that she started crying and hitting him—and, in doing so, pushed away the long hair that covered the general’s ears and discovered that part of one was missing.

If part of my maternal family was Bourbon to the core, my forebears on my father’s side were Piedmontese through and through. Or rather, they were Sardinian, which, at the time, was one and the same. The kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia was the heart of what later became Italy. My father’s ancestors all hailed from Sardinia, originally from the tiny north-western town of Bosa. They were a military lot, at least back in the 17th century, which is when my earliest continuous genealogical records date from. But by the 19th century, they had become a lot more interested in music than in weapons. Music is what brought my great-grandparents together.

My great-great grandmother Caterina was an accomplished pianist—her piano still graces my great-aunt’s home and Niccolo had a chance to pound it when we last went to visit her. Her next door neighbour played (I think) the violin, so they occasionally made music together. It was at these gatherings that Caterina’s son, Raffaele, met the neighbour’s daughter, Eugenia. They two fell in love, married and had five children including my grandfather, Carlo.

My great-grandfather, Raffaele, was particularly passionate about opera. So much so, in fact, that he earned the nickname Alfredo (from the main male character in La Traviata) and when his first grandson—my father—was born, he gave the boy the name Alfredo rather than his real one, Raffaele. Some of Raffaele’s children inherited his passion for music and the family talents—my great-aunt, Maria, tells me she sang for the King and Queen of Italy once.

Music also ran strong on my paternal grandmother’s side. My great-grandfather, Silvio, love opera, and one of my father’s distant cousins, Daniela Dessi, is a good-calibre soprano. Which is why it really galls me that I have the musical ear of a centipede and the vocal talents of a donkey.

Although I never specifically recall her mentioning Daniela, my paternal grandmother was very fond and proud of her extended family, even though most of them lived far away and she rarely got to see them.

I remember she often spoke with admiration of one of her nieces who had adopted two disabled girls that were roughly my age. We are talking about the Seventies here, a time when some families still hid their disabled children at home, let alone willingly adopted some. My grandmother’s niece must have been a heck of a brave woman. I can’t remember her name, but the eldest of the two girls was, I think, called Annalisa.

My grandmother herself was a very brave, strong woman, who overcame her fair share of tragedies. She lost the baby girl she had so desperately wanted—Grazia, born fifth after four sons—to pneumonia. Grazia had just turned two at the time and died just a day after my uncle, my grandmother’s sixth child, was born. Once, my grandmother showed me a dress and doll that had belonged to Grazia. It was some thirty years after the baby had died. I thought I felt her pain then—but now that I have children of my own, I know I didn’t really understand then the enormity of what she went through.

But my favourite story among those my grandmother told me has a happier ending. My father was born premature at the worst possible time to do so—during the Second World War. He failed to grow because his digestive system was immature. He was saved, my grandmother told me, by an army doctor, Doctor Fusar Poli, who advised her to give him plenty of fibres to help his bowels develop. By then, my grandmother and the children had retreated to the countryside and she told me how she used to run from field to field under the dropping bombs to beg farmers for the fruit my father needed. She must have done well enough, because he ended up becoming a very tall man.

I can’t conceive two women more different than my maternal and paternal grandmothers. Come to think of it, they are both very different from me. And yet, I have inherited a lot from both of them,  physically (my paternal grandmother bequeathed me with less than slim legs, my maternal grandmother with the ‘bad blood’ typical of Sardinian natives) as much as temperamentally. In particular, with my maternal grandmother, Ida, I share a passion for baking and art, and the habit of waking up early in the morning no matter the day.

One of my most vivid memories of staying at her house was the smell of coffee wafting through the rooms when it was still dark outside. She woke up early, around six-ish, and made herself a strong caffe latte. I would wake up soon afterwards, before everyone else, and she would pour me some latte too—a cup which, I suspect, had far more caffeine than a child was supposed to drink. In her youth, Ida was known for making excellent bread. I never tasted it myself, as she had long since stopped making bread by the time I was born, but I often had her pizzette—tiny rounds of pale dough filled with cheese, tomato sauce and capers, and fried in sizzling olive oil—which I remember as one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted. She was incurably unable to give out a recipe—her directions always called for ‘a bit of this, and a tad of that’—and it has taken me years to try and replicate her pizzette. Even now, they are not quite what she made—or perhaps it’s because the taste of the ones she made is flavoured with pleasant memories.

My grandmother has also left something of hers to my son. Niccolo is left-handed, like she was. Seen as some researchers now think left-handedness is genetic, it may be that she truly bequeathed it.
Caterina too may be left-handed. She picks up things and hands them over with both hands, but I have seen her grip the pencil and point more often with her left than with her right. How odd would it be for two right handed parents to have two left handed children! Mind you, at 11 1/2 months, it is still too early to tell which han she favours.

At the moment, all her efforts are devoted to learning how to walk. She is now able to stand and even bend, pick something up and stand up again—but continues to throw her legs in any whichever direction. She also stands on the very tip of her toes, which makes it harder to muster the walking technique (although Nicco did that too, and got the hang of walking in a week). Where she has made a massive leap forward, by contrast, is learning to speak. She repeats all the sounds we make, and has said her first word. No, it is not mum (or any variation thereof) nor is it papa. It is ‘bow-bow’ (as in a dog barking). Clearly, my kids are not even remotely interested in calling their parents (Nicco’s first word was ‘oh-oh’ followed by ‘via,’ which is Italian for away, and then ‘apple’).

Caterina started saying bow-bow after we went to visit my in laws a few weeks ago and she heard my mother in law calling their dog ‘bow-wow.’ At first, I thought she was just repeating the sound, but when we arrived in Sardinia last Friday, she spotted a dog, pointed at it and said ‘bow bow.’ We saw many more dogs since then and she bow-bowed them all, so I think we can officially say this is her first word.

Not all my memories are so momentous, of course. I like to capture the little things too, the sentences that made me laugh, or the silly moments I would otherwise forget. Like this one—Niccolo has always been a fiercely independent kid (one of his first sentences was “I do it myself”) but a few days ago he surpassed himself. He looked at me straight in the eye and told me: “I want to go and live by myself. In Paris.” I am dealing with adolescence ten years too early.

And what about you? Which memories are you honouring today? Please post a link to your memories blog post in the comments section so we can all celebrate them together. And don’t forget that, by leaving a comment, you can enter my Memories giveaway and have a chance to win a tailor-made collage, a digital collage sheet or a downloadable tag.