2010 Italy – Piove de Saco
We spent one night at Piove di Sacco which was the village where my mother was born. I had always been interested in family history but my mother knew virtually nothing about her ancestors so I wanted to make some enquiries. My mother’s maiden was Eginardo and as there was only ever one Eginardo family in Piove di Sacco it was easy to find descendants through the internet including the Eginardo Driving School. I discovered Icilio who was my mother’s cousin and she phoned him and arranged for us to meet. With my Italian being so basic it was a relief when Federika offered to call and make all the arrangements.
After checking in at our hotel, Federika called Icilio who was 85 years old and arranged to meet for lunch. He drove his car to our hotel which was just round the corner from his house and told us to follow him. At the restaurant, we were shown to a table and handed a menu with an enormous selection to choose from. I had assumed that as Icilio was elderly and very small he would not eat much but he went through the menu making suggestions which we were happy to accept as everything sounded so good. He ordered polenta with prawns for the first course, and then black risotto for the second course. It was one of our favourite dishes but one portion would have been enough for Federika and me for the entire meal. Then came chicken piccata for the main course which we were nowhere close to finishing as we were so full. We felt bad because we had not finished any of the dishes whilst Icilio devoured his without a problem. We were much too full to consider a dessert but without asking, Icilio ordered tiramisu which was the best I had ever tasted but painful to eat. When the bill came we wanted to treat Icilio but he took it and insisted on paying. Just before leaving, he asked us:
“Shall we come back here tonight for a pizza?”
We thought he was joking but it turned out he was not only serious but would have been very disappointed if we declined the invitation.
“How do you keep so thin when you eat so much?” I asked.
“When I am at home I eat only 1500 calories a day and weigh everything to make sure I stay inside that limit. When I go out it is a special occasion so I eat whatever I want.”
I could understand the logic but how a stomach which was used to eating such small meals all week could suddenly expand to take enough to feed several horses was beyond me. 
During the meal, I was keen to get some information about the Eginardo family and was armed with pen and paper to laboriously write it all down but out of the blue, Icilio handed me a twenty-page booklet produced by his cousin Giuliani who had been researching family records since he was 18 and he was now 87. So from not even knowing what my great-grandfather’s name was, I now had detailed records going back to the 1700’s.
After lunch, we arranged to meet Fabio Ferarra who was from my Italian grandmother’s side. We thought Icilio would be tired and want to go for an afternoon nap (like I wanted to) but he insisted on going to the town centre with us and meeting Fabio. We took a quick look around the cathedral where my grandparents were married and then went to a local café to phone Fabio. Piove di Sacco had never been a big place and it turned out that I was distantly related to the café owner, Emma Pistello Ferrara. She was intrigued by the whole thing and the café started to fill up with long-lost relatives. Fabio arrived with his cousin and we had a long chat. When I say chat, it was Federika doing all the chatting while I hung onto every word trying to make some sense of what was being said. Fabio was very friendly and enthusiastic but talked like an express train and I had to admire Federika for having the ability and energy to keep up with him. He gave me some sheets of paper with my mother’s ancestry going back to the 1700s complete with some amazing scandal. I had recently found out that my grandmother was six months pregnant when she married my grandfather which was surprising enough but I then discovered that my great-grandfather had two families on the go at the same time so my grandmother and her brother were born out of wedlock. It must have been a pretty shocking thing in a catholic village in the early 1900s. My mother and her sister (Lela) had no idea about all this but were not the type to be bothered by it.
By this time Federika and I were shattered and still completely stuffed from lunch but Icilio still insisted we joined him for a pizza. After a short rest in our hotel, we returned to the restaurant and discovered that our waitress was from Bosnia so having had my brain bashed by turbo-charged Italian all day I now had to struggle with Croatian. We discovered that the wonderful Italian food we had for lunch was cooked by someone from Kosovo. Federika and I ordered one pizza to share which turned out to be the biggest I had ever seen. 
Even if we were hungry we couldn’t have finished it but we managed to struggle through three-quarters of it. Icilio devoured an entire pizza and was disappointed that we physically couldn’t have eaten dessert if our lives depended on it. Not only had Icilio paid for lunch but he insisted on also paying for dinner, It was his town and we were his guests so there was no way he would let us pay for anything. What an amazing character he was and how incredibly fit for his age. For many years he had gone a 20-kilometre walk once a week although the doctor had recently told him to cut it down to five kilometres as he was developing a minor heart problem. He had never married and was retired from a good job in a bank so with a good pension I don’t suppose he had much to spend his money on.
2010 Italy
