A drama loving family

My family is what you would call the “typical Italian family”: big, loud, folkloric, crazy… My grandmother had an uncle that would always say and do whatever he wanted to; a really spontaneous man. The problem is that living in fascist Italy you could get yourself in a lot of trouble for this kind of things. But he never seemed to worry much about it. So, as random as he was, one day he told his wife to start cooking dinner and that he would go buy some cigarettes. He came back two years later… What did the man do for such a long time? Apparently he went to India because, why not?

Another anecdote from my Italian family is that my grandmother’s father and mother side hated each other to death (which is probably one of the reasons they divorced so early). So they exchanged for many years an epistolary relationship between both sides in which they basically insulted one another. We now own some of the letters that contain fancy insults from the late 18th century.

The last anecdote from this part of my family is about my grandfather’s childhood. As a grown man he always seemed really serious and sometimes cold, but he had a genuine love for animals. So here you have a child probably about 7 years old during the late 20’s in the French countryside. This kid loved animals: he took care of them, he would play with animals whenever they were around… But there was this special furry friend of his that he would always keep with him; he even was secretly sneaking him in school. This special animal was a baby fox that he found wandering around his house.

-M