When a family returns to its ancestral roots, what do they find?
An Australian family’s emotional return to Europe reveals the bittersweet legacy of post-war migration – and the powerful bonds that span generations.
If heaven is the rolling hills of Italy in high summer, this, then, is the afterlife: the realisation of a thousand whispered prayers, the sweetest reward for a lifetime of sacrifice, the completion of a journey spanning more than half a century.
My grandparents are long gone, but it feels as though their spirits still linger over the vast, verdant fields of their homeland. I sense them in the quiet pews of the stone churches where they prayed, near the burbling village wells where they drew their water, in the glorious expanse of lush grapevines where they toiled under the hot sun during the annual harvest.
They were here, then they were not. And now they are with us, although they are not. We have travelled halfway across the world for this: three generations, two plane rides, and a clunky white rental van that arrived bearing the scars of its own chequered history: an eclectic collection of scratches, nicks and dents, to which we will spend three weeks adding our share.
For my parents, who left their tiny villages as children, the decision to revisit them has been 18 months in the making. When What if? coalesces into Why not?, there is a flurry of arrangements and early morning phone calls, newly discovered cousins and WhatsApp messages, and logistics, so many logistics.
We have high hopes for this trip, but in the end, they will be exceeded. For my children, who have never before seen their good-humoured Nonno cry, it will become a turning point in their understanding of heritage, of the stories they tell themselves and the stories they are told. For myself, it becomes a reconciliation with the past. I grew up in Sydney speaking a different language to my grandparents. The hardship they experienced was as incomprehensible to me as the Italian they spoke.
All four of my grandparents left relatives in Italy. None of them ever saw their parents again. They’d spent the first half of their lives within a stone’s throw of their extended families, but the second half was reduced mostly to silence from home, punctuated by the occasional letter or terrible STD call, inevitably bringing news of someone else’s death.
None of which is to say I saw any evidence of regret about the decision to leave Italy. If they felt that way, they kept it to themselves. They renounced their Italian citizenship at the urging of their new government, tried in middle age to learn a new language, and forged the first tenuous ties to their local communities. My youngest aunt, Dad’s sister, Lyn, was born here. Australia was my grandparents’ country for as long as I knew them, and they embraced its opportunities with the same mix of forbearance and gratitude that came to define the post-war migrant generation. There was graft, and grind, and ultimately gratification. But starting afresh halfway across the world brought a set of inescapable trade-offs. It was possible – sometimes necessary – to live a half-life, with their heads in one place and their hearts in another.
My family’s story, in that sense, is notunique. Between 1947 and 1961, about 170,000 Italians arrived in Australia, in response to the federal government’s “populate or perish” initiative that encouraged large-scale immigration. Despite that, few incentives awaited them. There was no social support, no welfare, no employment assistance. Many eventually prospered, but not before enduring years of isolation and financial hardship. Decades later, Spanish researcher Dr Joseba Achotegui would coin the term “Ulysses Syndrome” to describe the “toxic levels of stress” that can develop in otherwise healthy migrants in response to being displaced from their homelands.
My paternal grandparents,Mario and Begina, arrived penniless in 1951. My mother’s parents, Guido and Giustina, had immigrated equally poor in 1950. Both my parents were born in northern Italy: my father, Peter, in Camagna Monferrato, near Milan; my mother, Elles, in Cavaso del Tomba, north of Venice. Dad was just four when he left and Mum was little more than a toddler. Like so many others across Europe, their families were forced from their homeland by crippling poverty, a sense of post-war displacement and a desire for a life that wasn’t dependent on the whims of land that took away as readily as it gave.
Mum’s family ended up on a rural property outside Griffith in the NSW Riverina, where they grew grapes, while Dad’s settled in the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown, where they eventually opened a series of fruit shops.
My siblings and I subsumed these facts early; for years they formed the scaffolding of our childhood. We grew up in a household where English was the norm, except on Sundays when Dad’s parents came over to tend the vegetable patch out the back.
For the longest time I was indifferent about seeing where they came from, and for my parents, raising five kids on a single income, there was no spare money for international travel anyway. Not that my grandparents were advocating a visit to their villages. Occasionally, Nonna Begina would come over all melancholy and tell us, in broken English, how difficult her early years were. Hunger. Suffering. The early deaths of her parents, along with four of her five siblings. She was convinced it was only a matter of time before la miseria – an amorphous set of misfortunes – would circle back around to bankrupt and break us all.
Even when I was old enough to travel alone, I made a conscious decision to stick to the tourist traps – all the parts of Italy that had nothing to do with my family. Good pasta, good bread, good churches, goodbye.
Then I got married and had children, but rather than absorbing and then ignoring the Italian aspect of their lives the way I had, they were fascinated by it. On heritage days at school, they wore caps emblazoned with “Italy”. One came home outraged after being accused by a classmate of not really being Italian.
By then, there had been a baton change in my family: after my grandparents’ deaths, the women on both sides had become the custodians of our history. My husband, upon hearing my aunts’ stories about the old country, urged me to write them down before they were lost for good. I did it, but even then my heart wasn’t truly in it.
And then, we started planning for this trip. We would fly to Rome, it was decided, travelling first to Mum’s family, before seeing where Dad grew up. His older sister Maria was promptly in touch with their cousin Silvia, who, in turn, mobilised an army of relatives ahead of our arrival. On Mum’s side, though, family is thin on the ground. Her paternal grandfather, Giacomo, married twice; he and his first wife, Speranza, had three boys, one of whom would become my grandfather, Guido. Then, in 1922, she died giving birth to her fourth baby, who also died. Giacomo subsequently married Speranza’s younger sister, Maria, and together they had another four children, all of whom moved to Australia as young adults in the 1950s. Our last connection to Cavaso del Tomba – a cousin, Gianni, the son of one of Guido’s full brothers – still lives near the village with his wife Liliana. They normally summer at their house in the Canary Islands, but this year, for the first time, medical appointments had delayed their departure. We had his ageing pacemaker and her failing eyesight to thank for a reunion none of us was expecting.
We arrive in the mountainous Cavaso delTomba on a Wednesday morning, with Bobby Darin on the stereo, crooning, fittingly enough, about a life beyond the sea. The town is bathed in sunshine and silence, broken only by the raucous cries of our children when they discover Via Caldoie, the road where my grandparents once had a house. The place has since been renovated, the beautiful stone rendered and then painted orange. My mother, who can’t remember any of it, instead orients herself using the well her parents used to refer to out the front, which is still full of water, albeit covered with a thick skein of green mould, obscuring a large family of goldfish. In her haste to call one sister in Australia, she dials the other. “Novella,” she says gleefully, “guess where I am!”
Eventually we steer ourselves to the local cemetery, where my mother’s brother Giovanni’s remains were interred. He died as an infant, exact cause unknown, back in 1940, before my mother was born. My eldest aunt, Aires, remembers their father returning from the war in his army uniform, and the sight of a tiny coffin resting on the table. Back then, the family could not afford a headstone, but by the time Nonna Giustina returned to visit Italy in 1978, someone had taken pity on the family and bought a proper grave marker for him. It was, my mother says, a relief for her. She had been plagued by guilt about how he’d died before a priest could baptise him. The fact that his grave had gone unmarked for so long seemed to her to be the ultimate indignity.
Today, though, Giovanni’s headstone has disappeared again. Italian laws hold that burial plots are leased, not purchased. After 30 years, remains are exhumed then reburied elsewhere. In death, as in life, no one was given notice when my uncle’s time was up. One day his grave was there, the next it was gone. His final resting place remains unknown.
As we start to leave the village, we stumble across a memorial for my grandparents’ neighbour, Alfredo Ballestin. He was just 19 in 1944 when the Nazis learned he had scrawled “Viva Italia” across some official paperwork. They retaliated by storming his house, dragging his parents out, setting fire to the place and then forcing them to watch while they hanged their son from a balcony near a local church. My grandmother, who was powerless to stop them, used buckets of water from the well to douse the flames. Unsurprisingly, her family’s house, which shared a common wall, also caught fire and they lost everything.
More than 80 years on, the stone memorial to Alfredo reads in part: “He fell victim to Nazi barbarism under the eyes of his dear parents … flames lit up his ordeal with sinister flashes.” Distracted, we all return to the rental van, but one aborted hill-start later, the ugly old clunker is sporting a newly crushed rear fender. In the context of all that we have seen today, we thank our lucky stars and continue on our way.
We go back to the area the following day, where we have arranged to meet Mum’s cousins, Gianni and Liliana, at their house. My grandfather died several years before I was born, but as it turns out, there is no mistaking his genes. I would have picked Mum and Gianni as kin before I met him. You can see it in the set of their chins, the shape of their noses, the span of their hands. They have the same observant eyes, and as it turns out, the same placid disposition. Liliana, like my father, is much more of a talker. They break out the prosecco and then mix it with Aperol and some sort of ginger concoction that our kids are too young to pretend to enjoy. An hour later, we are back in the car, where the plan is to follow Gianni to a restaurant he knows. He’s 85, but after two minutes following him on the road we have renamed him Gianni Piastri. The man negotiates corners like he’s slicing through butter.
We arrive at a large, empty restaurant that we later discover is run by one of Liliana’s former schoolmates. They’re normally closed at this hour, but, having been pre-briefed about our arrival, the owner has kept the place open in our honour, and apparently decided to double the serving size of everything. Even Gianni and Liliana seem surprised by her generosity.
Over lunch it transpires that we actually went to the wrong cemetery yesterday. Amazingly, given the small size of Cavaso, there are two. Gianni and Liliana would be happy to show us the way now. It’s an unforeseen turn of events, but the summer sun is high, and no one wrote a rule book for reunions, anyway. We wander around the right cemetery for a while, chatting easily. When we part that day, my Mum is quiet. Uncharacteristically, we all are. The mental load is surprisingly heavy. It’s a lot, this reunion-after-a-lifetime business.
Another two days and a drive-by of LakeComo later, we arrive in Dad’s village of Camagna Monferrato. Despite Italian being their native tongue, it’s been years since my parents relied on their separate dialects, and both were nervous about trying to make themselves understood. Dad conveyed these fears to his cousin Silvia, who had her two adult daughters, Lucrezia and Ludovica, fly over from England where they are working and studying respectively, in case we needed interpreters. She needn’t have worried (her English is fine, and her husband Enrico’s is even better), although the younger women and their respective partners, Lorenzo and Iacopo, are delightful.
Before we go any further, an explanation. Silvia’s uncle Dante and her mother Pierina were born in Sydney but spent their entire adult lives in Italy. Their father, Riccardo, and my grandfather, Mario, were brothers, born into a family of five boys and two girls. The sisters never left Italy, but of the brothers, the middle three – Eduardo, Riccardo and Mario – migrated to Australia in the early post-war years for reasons relating to financial hardship. Riccardo and his wife Teresina had their children in Australia, but moved back to Camagna when Dante and Pierina were teenagers.
Today, they are more comfortable communicating in Italian, but when they speak English it’s with the broadest of Australian accents. Pierina, who apparently never liked her given name, still prefers to go by Peggy, which is what the nuns at her inner Sydney Catholic school called her in the 1950s, having deemed Pierina too hard to pronounce.
Although my Dad has largely been communicating with Silvia to date, it is the reunion with Dante that he is most anticipating. When he arrives at Silvia’s house, an exceptionally well-preserved octogenarian with a Nikon camera slung over his shoulder, everybody suddenly has tears in their eyes. My husband, the family chronicler, has his phone at the ready. When he posts the footage online, the response from my siblings is swift. “This video has destroyed me,” my youngest brother writes on the family WhatsApp group.
We barely have time to catch our breaths before the indefatigable Silvia has us on the move: there is a tour of the nearby quarry, a booking for a tasting at a winery, and then a dinner reservation at a restaurant whose specialty, boiled offal, arrives sandwiched between a dizzying array of other courses. We do our best to keep up with the locals, but the children eventually demur. It’s 10.30pm, and the only cultural experience they are after involves a pillow.
We reconvene the next morning, having been promised an audience with even more relatives. True to her word, Silvia manages to produce cousins on both sides of my Dad’s parents’ families. She wants us to see the synagogue in the nearby town of Casale, where her mother Peggy moved into an apartment following her husband’s death. At first it seems like an unusual diversion, given my family has been Catholic since the antiquities, but the tour is so comprehensive that even the kids sit spellbound for 45 minutes. Just two Jewish families use the synagogue today – descendants of the only locals who survived World War II.
When we leave, we hear the ubiquitous church bells in the distance. If Catholicism is my family’s heartbeat, church bells are its soundtrack. Here, they toll regularly for any number of reasons. Sometimes it’s on the hour, sometimes not. Asked about their curious rhythms, a local relative shrugs. “Eh, who knows,” she smiles enigmatically. “They keep their own time.”
Our next stop is a much-anticipated visit to Dad’s childhood home, which has long been uninhabited but is still owned and maintained by a local cousin. It’s mid-morning when we arrive, wandering up an unsealed road off Via Casale, which has panoramic views of the surrounding countryside. Behind an old gate, three humble brick houses await us. The smallest of these was Dad’s. He was born here in the late 1940s, seven years after his sister Maria. As her own mother had before her, my grandmother endured the difficult home births not by choice but out of economic necessity.
We have been warned to expect a very basic dwelling; upon seeing the place some years ago, one of my visiting Australian cousins is said to have been reduced to tears. In fact, it looks like something a child might draw: two bare rooms, one stacked directly on top of the other, with a set of concrete stairs. There is no bathroom, no kitchen, no running water, and no electricity. On the left is a stable that was once occupied by the family cow. In winter this is where they slept, nestled against the animal for warmth.
Back inside, a few pieces of heavy wooden furniture have now been pushed against the walls, their drawers lined with paper ripped from old magazines. Despite the lack of basic amenities, my grandparents stayed here when they visited Italy in 1974, and a number of books, the covers painstakingly wrapped in paper to protect them, now line the shelves.
Outside, a fig tree is bearing large and delicious fruit. I’d be more than happy to harvest everything and make camp for lunch, but another restaurant booking awaits us up the hill. We detour past the church of St Eusebio, where my grandparents were married and my Dad and his sister were baptised, but its doors are tightly closed and there is no one in sight.
We take photos anyway and adjourn to a restaurant; we discover the building was actually Dad’s preschool in a former life. Asked whether he remembers any of it, he shakes his head. “Absolutely not,” he grins.
Once again, the meal itself is a movement in innumerable parts, Silvia having briefed the chefs about the need for locally sourced food and wine. We consider it a culinary triumph, but Silvia’s husband Enrico says his mother-in-law’s pasta is better: “Peggy’s agnolotti is so soft that you don’t even have to chew it. She makes it a month before Christmas and freezes it. We go over and preview it beforehand. Quality control,” he says, smiling mischievously.
We do a whistlestop tour of yet another cemetery, before tackling our final assignment for the day: visiting another church, the Sacro Monte of Crea, 25km away. As ever, there is a story attached, one my Zia Maria has told so many times that most of her side of the family in Sydney can recite the details from memory. When my grandfather, Mario, was conscripted into the Italian Army prior to World War II, he entered basic training, where he struck up a friendship with a man from a neighbouring town. They ended up stationed in different places: my grandfather, employed as a cook, was sent to Crete, while his compatriot was shipped off to Russia. If either survived, they agreed, they would go immediately to Crea to pray for the safe return of the other.
That was back in 1939. In 1945, when Mario was finally sent home, he remembered the promise he had made to his friend. On the first Sunday back, he and my grandmother had no car, so they instead undertook the five-hour walk to Crea. When they got there, the church was deserted, so Mario decided to wait until the confessional was free. Minutes later, the door opened – and to his astonishment, his army buddy emerged, having also fulfilled his half of the pact. It was a moment that would stay with my grandfather forever, confirming his faith in a benevolent and protective God.
We make good on a promise to my aunt to light a candle, and emerge from the quiet church wondering what comes next. The answer – more drinks and gelato – presents itself in the form of a small cafe nearby.
Outside, my Dad’s cousin Vilma clutches his hand, as she has, on and off, over the past day. As children, they played together in the dirt, and she remembers the four-year-old version of my Dad as “gram”, which in their dialect roughly translates to naughty and mean. She says she has thought of him over the years but never seen him, having never been able to access a photo from anyone. (Dad is notoriously camera-shy.)
Today, though, every childhood grudge is forgiven and forgotten. She is dreading the thought of him leaving again.
“Questa visita è stata così breve che temo che la tua partenza mi causerà un dolore al cuore,” she says. Literally, “This visit has been so short that I’m afraid your leaving will create a pain in my heart.”
Eventually, though, it’s time to go, and I immediately start dreaming up a host of excuses to prolong the day. But in the end, much like my grandparents had many years before me, I realise we have run out of reasons to stay. It strikes me later that my parents recognised this fact long before I did and responded with more equanimity than I had. Perhaps a lifetime of watching their own parents’ stoicism – Nonno Guido, who died before he could make it back to Italy, or Nonno Mario, who would periodically learn of the deaths of his beloved family before clocking on at the fruit shop with tears rolling down his cheeks – has conditioned them to accept what they cannot change.
They are better for this visit, though. We all are. The world is a much smaller place now than it once was, and technology has made it smaller again. Silvia’s young daughters, having already been to Australia once before, are keen to return and show their partners around. Their grandmother is in her eighties, but her memories of Sydney remain sharp: the sweetness of ripe mangoes at the height of summer, the waves that crash against the shore at Sydney’s Coogee Beach. As her granddaughters throw their arms around her and laughingly refer to her as Peggy, I’m grateful we have been welcomed so readily into their home. It turns out the afterlife – the one that ultimately arrived too late for my grandparents – is more beautiful than even they could have imagined. Somewhere, I hope they are enjoying it too.
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