ONE SELF PORTRAIT EVERY DAY in 2020 : 287

Nonno was born on 13.10.1913. and was the youngest of 8 children (9 including a half sister). 13 is a lucky number in Italy. He was 12 when both his parents died. I was 13 when he died aged 67. I remember I loved him so much and would have loved to have known him when I was older. 

He always had a sense of humour; when he was dying of lung cancer someone who he hadn’t been in touch for a while phoned him and asked how he was “fine, apart from a touch of lung cancer”. 

He used to smoke MS (Monopolio di Stato) cigarettes and I remember when both my grandparents decided to cut down from smoking two packets each every day to one packet each.

I have loads of lovely memories. Until the age of 8 the only language I spoke fluently was French and I could speak English but my Italian was minimal. Nonno could speak French so we would talk to him in French and he would translate to Nonna. I remember saying “”Rigolo” and he would say “Buffo” and I would say, “Non, rigolo!”

When we moved to Italy, I remember wanting to learn Italian swear words, my dad and my mother’s cousin, Roberto, taught us the worst swear words but wouldn’t tell us us what they meant: “Dante Alighieri! Michelangelo! Leonardo Da Vinci” they would whisper asking us never to repeat these vile words in public, “Garibaldi! Benito Mussolini!” Anyway when we visited my school, they had schoolwork on posters on the walls and I was shocked to see titles like Garibaldi and Mussolini. Apparently I didn’t notice that someone had written on the wall in big letters “CAZZO DI BUDDA”

I picked up colourful Roman swearing pretty quickly though, mainly learnt from our school bus driver: “Li mortacci”, “fijo de ‘na mignotta!”, “va’ mmorì ammazzato!” …

I remember his Fiat Millecento, there was a blanket on the back seat that smelt of onions. I remember him driving me around Rome showing me the sites. 

He was hopeless at school so his older brother, Bruno, a fighter pilot, sent him to aviation military school where he learnt to be a mechanic. 

During the war he was a mechanic on bomber planes, I remember being amazed that he had to sometimes fix the engine when in the air. He spent the war in Africa and his plane bombed innocent people, I remember the neighbour’s son accusing my grandfather of being a Fascist because he fought in the war and him replying that everybody had to go to war, I remember being confused, as he was a kind and good person. He was also a victim of the war. 

My aunt Roberta says that after the war he received a bronze (or silver, it’s difficult to tell) medal but it was not something he boasted about and the family only knew about it because of the cheque he would get once a year because of it (initially 300 Lira per year but because of inflation the final payments were 40,000 Lira). He didn’t think it was right to receive a prize for going to war, he was a staunch pacifist.

He never quarrelled or had a grudge and always excused people who behaved badly and that was not something that Nonna liked as she was a, as Roberta put it, a “giustiziera”.

My mother was born in 1941 and he didn’t see her until after the war. In fact, after Italy surrendered in Africa in 1943, he had to make his way back to Italy and was stuck in the north in the Repubblica di Salò and wouldn’t be able to get home until April 1945. Apparently he pretended to be ill and waited it out.

After the war he had no steady work for a few years but he then found work through a connection as an impiegato (an office worker) for ACI (automobile Club Italia) and he worked there until he retired. It was very low pay due to his lack of qualifications and nobody knows what the job was but at least it was a job with a low but steady income . He retired when he was 65 and paid his debts with the money from the liquidazione and died two years later. 

Roberta told me that when Nonno was a kid, they live in Anzio (by the sea) and although he was only five, the kids would go out on their own. One day, a young fisherman called Andrea saw a white piece of cloth floating in the sea, he decided to fish it out and it turned out to be a white shirt with an almost drowned boy. She remembers visiting Andrea in Anzio in the sixties with Nonno and Andrea who was then in his eighties remembered the incident well.

I think I looked like him. I remember him explaining to me about Socialism, about the failure of Soviet Communism and how great Tito was. He also explained to me the the quite complicated points system in Formula 1 (the winner getting 9 points, second place six points and then 4,3, 2,1 points – it has changed since then). He was a Roma fan but inadvertently made me support Inter (I asked him which team was the strongest and he told me Inter, he was wrong though) and we used to play the schedina del totocalcio together (he would buy two columns and I would randomly fill in one of them).

He taught me “De gustibus non est disputandum” and also that we should be free to do anything we want as long as long as we are not harming anyone. 

Here I am holding his “Piastrina identificativa” (military dog tag) which he wore all the time every day during the war. If he died in action, this would be used to identify the body. 

Buon compleanno Lamberto Fulloni.

I AM STILL ALIVE

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