Relative values redressed

AN anxious return to an ancestral village provides a sharp lesson in what is expected of Australians.

IT'S 1975 and I am on a slow train in northern Italy en route to meet the people my family has always referred to as "the Italian relations". The name of the village where I am headed, Grosotto, is as familiar to me as the Perth suburb in which I grew up, but the names of many of the other stazioni from Milan northwards are strange.

My parents met and married in Australia, but Grosotto, a town that even now has just 1600 residents, is the home of both sides of my family.

The cemetery is full of my ancestors. This is one of the few places in the world where, I discover to my delight, I never have to spell out my surname.

Yet I am heading to see aunts and uncles and cousins who are unknown to me. My Italian is guidebook level, thanks to parents who believed they should always speak English so we'd turn into solid Aussies.

None of which is helping as I wonder how to navigate this reunion. I'm with a friend also named Helen, a fact that will shortly confuse the whole of Grosotto, where she will be known forever more as l'altra Elena or the other Helen. She's a wonderful woman but her Italian stops at scusi.

My anxiety increases as the train terminates at Tirano and we take the local bus, known in the north as the Pullman, for the final leg of the journey.

We've scrubbed up as best we can after a month of youth hostels and the regulation cheap pensione in London, Amsterdam, Rome and Florence, but we look pretty ordinary in our faded jeans and parkas and backpacks.

This is worrying me, along with the fact I am not convinced we're expected. There has been a vague attempt to warn of our arrival but I have been somewhat cavalier about the arrangements, assuming the extended family will be there when I turn up from halfway around the world, almost four decades since Dad left town.

We struggle with our packs as the bus pulls up outside the bar in the piazza. It's about 11am but a huddle of men are throwing back grappa, and among them, in what I will always regard as a minor miracle, one of my second cousins, twice removed, who happens to be visiting from Australia.

Translator and fixer in one, he shepherds us to the home of Zia Angelina. She's always had a soft spot for the brother who sailed for Melbourne in 1938 and who died a couple of years before my visit. "Uguale al povero Anselmo, uguale al povero Anselmo," she cries as I stagger up the steps. Just like my father indeed. It is the common refrain in the following days as I am paraded around town for aperitivi and biscotti.

I have been back to Grosotto many times since, but my strongest memories are of those afternoons in 1975 when I sat with great-aunts and uncles on my mother's side, and aunts and uncles and cousins on my father's, knitting together a shared history. I still have the notebook from that trip, listing the names of my Italian relatives.

The bambini now have children of their own, my father's generation is long since dead, my cousins long since retired.

These days the children of the village speak English. These days my siblings and I are on Facebook with my cousin's adult children. These days, my Italian is a little better.

In 1975, the two Helens are noticed wherever we go, occasioning a slight claustrophobia only relieved by the fact we can't understand much of what is going down. The social mores are intense. I may think my travelling clothes are, shall we say, uninspiring, but for Zia Angelina they carry a more complex message, one that must be addressed.

The morning after our arrival, I am taken off to the local shop and bought a new outfit of trousers and shirt. I am encouraged to wear these clothes whenever I step out. The jeans are history. L'altra Elena is excluded from this refurbishment, not being family and thus not a potential cause of embarrassment. I recognise the great generosity of this gift, but I get the subtext, too.

My father and my grandparents left Grosotto in search of an alternative to their poverty. Now, I look like the poor relative, returning in jeans rather than raiments of gold. It is my first, but not last, lesson in the strict codes of Italy. Thirty-five years on, the memory of that makeover is as intense as the afternoon aperitivi of my very first Italian reunion.