Ok, you asked for it, an autobiography that will be my longest post ever, rivaling
@Samaldinho
The old country to me is a small Southern town made up mostly of farmers, (like my father), and emigrants that found work in countries like Switzerland and Germany, plus Torino up North, because of FIAT. The lucky ones got government jobs because they sucked up to politicians.
I was the 8th of 9 children, 5 of whom died in infancy for maladies curable today. My father was a believer in corporal punishment, my mother my refuge. His own dad left him orphan at the age of 4 when he died at 24 in 1916 during WWI. Had a sister that emigrated to Argentina in 1952, I was 3, husband and 5 children, (my cousins), that never returned to the old country. I've since befriended some of them on Facebook.
Prior to moving to the U.S. I was in love with a girl named Anna and she with me. I was 16 and she 15, we kissed, touched some forbidden zones but never had sex. I remember on the plane looking at her picture with tears in my eyes. Two weeks after arriving in America I was no longer virgin and forgot about Anna. To this day I regret not going back for her, she's now a wonderful and pretty woman with a family.
With the news of my departure Anna's parents who had beaten her when people told them about seeing me, suddenly liked me and approved of the relationship even at such young age, a sort of promise of future engagement. Figured I would make them all wealthy, so quit school and for a couple of months started visiting Anna almost every day.
Would pick her up from middle schoo, help her with her home-work, listen to music together, sometimes playing with a rubber soccer ball taking turns at shooting. In the evenings his father would go to a tavern getting drunk, her mother knitting by the fireplace and we waiting for her to fall asleep.
Her little sister Nives was our guard and has soon as mom nodded off she alerted us and we could engage in heavy petting. I left her house with such a hard-on that would stop in the back of a little church to let it all out. These are among my happiest memories, a time of innocence and naivety that believed in the goodness of the world.
I was the first in my family to attend high school, my siblings stopped at 5th grade which was the term of elementary school. In middle school I won some kind of prize for writing an essay on any issue that I chose and mine was about Gianni Rivera. There was some money involved and my dad was never prouder, bragging to his friends about me.
We lived in town but had several farm properties on the outskirts that produced awesome fruits and vegetables but our fortunes often depended on the weather, so we weren't rich in money but had plenty to eat. I was never spoiled or gifted toys even on the feast of the Epiphany which is on January 6th when an old lady named "Befana" drops gifts down chimneys and Santa wasn't a big deal. In my socks I would receive apples, pears, dried figs, stuff that wasn't store bought. I would see friends with toy trucks, cars, and guns, and envied them.
I had a ton of friends and we made up our own games, sometimes I would borrow my father's bycicle and ride to the Volturno river a couple of miles away where the males swam with underwears on or nude and females a mile or so downriver doing the laundry. Sometimes I would race with friends to get to the river the fastest but never won. One thing about those days is that crime was non-existent and we didn't know what pedophilia was and had never heard of it.
The best times were on the football pitch where we played all the time emulating our idols, Milanisti, Interisti ,Juventini, Napoletani, still caring for each-other regardless. Loved everything about it, The sweat, the aches, the tiredness, the scratches, laying spent on the grass.
One time when I was 7 my 9 year old brother, (who died of a brain tumor in Italy at the age 44), convinced me to run away from home because he would be punished for missing school and I followed him.
We ran into another kid and he joined us so the 3 of us would roam along the farms and hide, slept two nights in haystacks trying to avoid ants and the third day we got caught
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I was on top of a pear tree when at a distance spotted a large crowd. My job had been to drop the fruit to my accomplices to eat but had not tasted any myself. I yelled an alert and they started running but were eventually caught. While the chase was going on I got down from the tree and managed to escape through a hole in the fence.
A few hours later I woke up from the grass on the field where we played when I saw my 16 year old sister walking toward me. As she came closer she waved a chocolate bar around and asked me to come home, I would not be punished and the chocolate would be mine. I was tired, sleepy, hungry, so gave her my hand.
The promises were not kept, got belted pretty good by my father, (my brother more severely), and never saw the chocolate again. The first and not only time that I got fooled by a woman.
My father left school at 3rd grade, the age of 9, because he was now the head of the family and was needed to work the farms with the help of other relatives. He was extremely intelligent, self thought, and loved Russian Literature that he read frequently, also helped neighbors with contracts and other legal issues. People used to tell me how nice and funny he was but with us very strict.
We had been sponsored to come to America by an uncle that left Italy in 1912, zio Filomeno, that when he boarded ship his sister, (my mom), wasn't born yet. They sent pictures, wrote letters, but the first time brother and sister met in person was in 1956 when she was 44, his first of two visits to the old country.
The papers to bring us to America were initiated in 1954 but it took 12 years of red tape to get the visa and a green card. They had some kind of quotas, like how many Italians allowed per year, and degree of relations, like husbands and wives, parents and children had prioritiy over siblings.
Through the years the America thing had become a joke with my friends and I had forgotten all about it, though the thought of travelling intrigued me. I knew little of Italy, the only city I had been to was Napoli, and I spoke its language, and our provincial capital Caserta, so travelling was one of my main goals for the future. Of the U.S. I knew through movies, cowboys and indians, insanely tall buildings, how everyone was supposed to be rich.
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When suddenly the call came the family was divided, my sister was married and had her own business, a brother preferred Germany where he had moved to but loved a married woman back in town, my oldest brother in Switzerland, as an adult couldn't come with us, had to be called by mom and joined us a year later.
My uncle owned a junk jewelry factory, there were many of them in Providence at the time so my mother and I already had jobs and my brother a year later as well in 1967. Zio Filomeno was a generous man that provided us with a furnished apartment that he paid the first month rent for and never asked for his money back. The sponsor in those days was responsible for us in every category, like food, shelter, employment, while the government offered no assistence to the immigrants from Italy.
My father was denied a visa because he was a member of the Italian Comunist Party and in order to join us was forced to change parties to the Christian Democrats, bringing our mayor home-made bottles of wine, chickens, eggs, and other products. This mayor was the same one under the Fascist regime but evidently had been re-born or something.
So 3 years after I came my father finally joined us and I was already married by then. He hated the country immediately, didn't like working in a factory under his brother in law, missed the open air that he enjoyde in open country, believed that people would think him stupid because couldn't speak English and was often sick.
My mother, on the other hand, loved it as her life was much easier than back in the old country but in 1975, six years after my father's arrival, they moved back to Italy where he immediately regained his health.
