Heritage network for Roseto Valfortore-Italy and it's sister city Roseto-PA
Nonna
I have often heard it said that grandparents enjoy and are much more relaxed with their grandchildren, than they were with their own children. Listening to my aunts and uncles reminisce of their mother and their youth, I can speak from experience and say from my part, that I think that holds true.
My grandmother, was born Maria Giovanna Sabatino, in the small town of Roseto Valfortore in the Province of Foggia. She was the oldest child and only daughter of Matteo Sabatino and Maria Celeste Cascioli. She was followed by six brothers, and with her father passing away at an early age, she would in fact at the age of 17 or so become the second mother to her youngest brother who was just a baby. I can only imagine what life would have been like for not only her mother, but also for Maria Giovanna to have this responsibility so young in life. Certainly nothing like what my life would be at the same age, many years later. It is a story I have often heard repeated by others telling of their ancestors. Life must have been hard, and I think that this would indeed shape and mold the young girl for who and what she would become later as an adult.
Nonna came to Canada in about 1911 to join her husband Luigi Lanza in the new world. In time she would see four of her six brothers also come to North America, but settle in the United States rather than Canada. I know this was hard for her because they had been such a huge part of her life in her growing up years in Italy. But over the years she made sure to go back and forth between Ohio and New Jersey to visit them. She was still the proverbial "mother". Nonna also went back to Italy several times, one time specifically to be with her mother when her brother Fausto passed away. This would leave only her Mother and one brother, Nicolo Domenico, in Italy . I don't recall hearing from my family, that she ever returned to Italy again after that time.
But then life was busy in Canada, raising five children. Nonna, who became known as Jenny to her friends was a very strong individual. Her early years of working alongside her mother in Italy served her well and there wasn't much she was afraid to tackle as her young family was growing up. I'll never forget a time when she was about 80 or so. She had co-erced my then husband into fixing part of the fence and gate in her backyard. There she was while he was trying to remove the post; with both her hands clamped around the top tugging and pulling - and nothing could convince her to just relax and let the job be done as she had asked. Such was the way of Nonna. She was always on top of things and was what we fondly referred to as the "Godfather" of our little family.
I always remember my grandmother reading the newspaper, and she had a great love of watching TV and recognizing all of the movie stars. So it was a huge surprise to me when my aunt told me not long ago that Nonna would not have had an education in Italy and that in fact when she came to Canada she could neither read nor write. In effect she taught herself by looking through the newspaper and listening to the folks on TV. She never lost her Italian accent even though she emmigrated at the age of about 28 and lived through almost 70 years before she passed away. But her desire to learn and understand even the simplest things was always at the forefront and was sometimes quite amusing. She had a particular liking for Fess Parker. One night she and I were sitting in the living room watching either Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett; I can't remember which - but I will always recall this conversation. Leaning avidly toward the screen taking it all in, she turned to me and said "Come si chiame?" To which I replied Fess Parker. She looked questioningly at me and I said it again, to which she said something like "Feh Pahke". I again said very slowly "no Nonna - Fess Parker". I should have known of course that that's exactly what she said - and she was sure to quickly tell me "yeh - thats whadda I say". I never had a problem understanding anything nonna was saying to me but it seemed that my friends did. Whenever they would come to the house to see me, nonna being a very social person along with thinking she should be some sort of host, would invariably come and sit with us in the living room. And talk she would! With terrified expressions on their faces, my friends would concentrate on listening to her - desparately trying to understand her, until they decided that maybe they should just nod politely or maybe give a little laugh - all of this while trying to eat her biscoti and drink tea. Unfortunately sometimes their reaction was not appropriate for whatever it was that nonna was trying to tell them. Nonplussed, nonna would just grin back at them. But she liked all of my friends, and I can't remember any of them who didn't like her.
My mom and aunts always talked of nonna's dominance and I know that some things were hard for them to take. For instance boyfriends were always a source of discussion and sometimes the results were not always to their liking. Invariably she wanted them to stick it out with someone they really did not like; but even worse was when they wanted to marry someone whom she did not approve of. This was even true for their two brothers. But in the end, after a few spoiled attempts, they drew in their horns and married who they wanted to marry anyway. Of course her Catholic upbringing was very important to her and I am sure this held sway in any of the discusions of the appropriateness of potential spouses. That's why I find it so endearing when years later, after meeting my then future husband-to-be for the first time, she would ask my mother. He's a no Italiane??? To which my mother replied that he wasn't. Nonna thought about that for a bit and then thinking he might have one more saving grace she asked the inevitable - that being, was he a Catholic. When my mother replied that no he wasn't, it really didn't take her long to say "Oh well - he's a nice a boy anyway." And from that point on he became "Bigga Man".
I never learned to speak Italian, but it was not for my grandmother's lack of trying. When I visited her as a young child she would get me to say things like: Chuide a port (close the door) - or Chuide a fenestra (close the window) - or vuless nu becchere d'acqua. (I want a glass of water). I also learned some other Italian phrases but these were certainly not at her prompting! And when we weren't playing teacher and pupil; she would simply lift me up onto her lap, wrap her arms around me, and I would lay my head against her chest while she would rock me back and forth singing something that sounded to my five year old mind very much like "nina nana nu nu", giggling all the while. Unfortunately and to my deepest regret I never did learn the language but those intimate times with nonna remain in my memory. As did the times that I would spend overnight with her . What made it so special was that I got to actually sleep with her. Of course I would have to go to bed quite a bit earlier than she did. I would lay there in her double bed staring at the wall ahead of me which always held a photo of the Virgin Mary And I don't ever remember a time when a palm sheaf wasn't tucked into the frame - that vision being indelibly etched into my memory. I can recall being a little frightened because of course at that young age the house seemed huge with 4 bedrooms on the second floor surrounding a large centre hallway. So I always breathed a sigh of relief when nonna would finally join me, quietly slipping into her nightgown, laying down beside me and fingering her nightly rosary; or if I had managed to fall asleep before she came up - waking up to feel her next to me.
Prior to this time when we moved from Toronto to Hamilton, my family actually lived at nonna's house. In fact my sister Nanci was born while we lived there. I had my own bedroom on the same side of the hall as nonna and there was a cupboard door high up in the wall where my aunt stored hats and other accessories. This was another source of anxiety for me at nighttime as I would stare at that closet door waiting for someone to come out, until fatigue would take over and I would finally fall asleep. By day I loved to get a chair and climb into the closet and play around with whatever was in there, daylight holding none of the villains and ghosts of the night before. Outside my bedroom door was a closet that housed a laundry chute which went down 3 floors into the basement. My young cousins and I would love to play at being spies with that, one being stationed on the top floor, one on the main floor in the hall closet and one in the basement where the laundry ended up - passing notes back and forth. The basement was another thing altogether. She had a cold room down there with all kinds of preserves and canned goods stocked. And in typical Italian fashion there was a gas stove for any kind of frying and a large wood covered table for making homemade pasta - not to mess up the main kitchen upstairs. That house would always be nonna for me! In later years it was where everyone met to go off for the day to a picnic, or to the lake for a swim, or to just spend time with the entire family.
Of course we eventually moved out of nonna's house and we kids were busy doing what kids do. We became teenagers and began dating boys - and eventually got married. Nonna was there for all of this. And on the times that I did visit her - maybe on my own - maybe with my husband - she would say "you stay for dinner we go IGA and get chicken". And she would roast a delicious chicken dinner - after which we would play bingo. She loved to play games. But even more than that she loved to sit in her dining room and play her opera records. She would shut the two pocket doors, get out her albums, put them on the player, and sit there at the dining room table with her albumn covers in her hands -happily singing away. This is one of the things that defines nonna for me. And I have a memory that keeps popping up in my head and makes me smile and sometimes cry a little. There were several of us gathered at my Aunt Ida and Uncle Amy's place one night. I really can't recall what the occasion was but at one point we ended up sitting around and singing Italian songs. We started singing "We`Marie" when all of a sudden my grandmother's voice rang out loud and clear. As if on cue, all of us stopped singing and looked at her. She was in her own little world, sitting with her eyes closed and singing We`Marie for her all she was worth. I don't think there was a dry eye in the living room that night. To this day We`Marie is a song that I request whenever I am at an Italian venue - and I always think of my grandmother.
Nonna had a wonderful garden and it was filled with all kinds of interesting plants that I am sure she remembered from her youth in Italy. It was loaded with poppies. I understood why years later when I visited Italy for the first time and saw the fields of poppies growing everywhere . I don't think anyone could grow them like she did - at least I never seemed to get the knack. In the alleyway by the garrage was a parade of hollyhocks, and over the fence were loads of sweet peas. The rest of the garden contained all the normal varieties, delphiniums, snap draggons, salvia, phlox to name a few and of course the ever present Rugosa Roses. At the back of the garden and against the garage wall was her vegetable garden loaded with tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, zucchini - all mixed in with basilica and parsley to name a few. She had a great sense of humour about herself and so it was that one day she sat her chair a little too close to the edge of the garden. I looked on with horror as I saw her chair leaning precariously into the garden. There was nothing to do but watch as the chair tilted and she fell sideways into the garden. There she lay surrounded by all that glory, laughing her silly head off and we all laughed with her when we realized she was okay. It was another thing trying to pull her out!
If I said in another story that my father was the inspiration for all of my genealogy searches then for sure my nonna held one of the necessary tools that took me to the culmination of this search. Some years before I started this journey my cousin Ray had sat down with her, as he had done with his other grandmother and asked her to tell him who her parents and grandparents were. She did better than that. She was able to recite for him not only her grandparents names, but those of her great grandparents and her great great grandparents, on both sides of her family. I know now that such was the way of Roseto Valfortore. Everyone knew everyone else and they knew which family a person belonged to. It is so different than here in Canada where we remain rather anonymous. I wish she could see her little town now as I have been able to see it through the eyes of the internet and all of the sharing that other Rosetani descendants and I have been able to do. She would marvel at the fact that we can be in touch with each other so easily through the wonderful technology that we have today. I believe she would be very pleased. I also wish she could have known the wonderful man I met and married just four years after she passed away. I would have loved to hear her call him "Bigga Man". And she would be happy to know that although I never had children of my own, that I was fortunate enough to have two grandchildren. I think they all would have gotten a kick out of her.
I look through my family albums and I see photos of nonna, up north at the cottage being a good sport holding a string of huge fish that someone had caught. I see her - so proud with her first two grandchildren, Mary Ann and Louis; and later on by an old tree stump with my sister as an infant and with me posed next to her in some old clothing of hers that I had found in her attic. I see her at her children's weddings and I see her at her 85th birthday celebration all dressed up and looking as sharp as ever. But most of all I love and cherish all the old time photos of her and my grandfather that were taken in their early years before I was born - the years that I have tried so hard to learn about, because I never thought to question her history when she was still alive.
We as a family celebrated many milestones with nonna - her 80th, her 85th her 90th and her 95th. She was in fantastic health for all of them and still very sharp mentally. I don't recall her being ill a day in her life, never being in a hospital once. She had all her childen at home and she lived in that house almost right up to the end. In the last year of her life she was bedridden - just plain old tired out. When it could not be managed any longer - she was moved to a nursing home. She passed away one month later. My last memory of her is when I visited her a couple of nights before. She reached for my hand and I saw that she was so cold. I told her I would bring an extra blanket from home for her and I did the very next evening. The following morning she was gone. The nurses said she simply woke up, had breakfast, and went back to sleep. It was just as peaceful as that! She was in her 97th year and she'd had a good long life. She was the only grandparent I knew and I feel blessed to have had her for so long.
My grandmother, was born Maria Giovanna Sabatino, in the small town of Roseto Valfortore in the Province of Foggia. She was the oldest child and only daughter of Matteo Sabatino and Maria Celeste Cascioli. She was followed by six brothers, and with her father passing away at an early age, she would in fact at the age of 17 or so become the second mother to her youngest brother who was just a baby. I can only imagine what life would have been like for not only her mother, but also for Maria Giovanna to have this responsibility so young in life. Certainly nothing like what my life would be at the same age, many years later. It is a story I have often heard repeated by others telling of their ancestors. Life must have been hard, and I think that this would indeed shape and mold the young girl for who and what she would become later as an adult.
Nonna came to Canada in about 1911 to join her husband Luigi Lanza in the new world. In time she would see four of her six brothers also come to North America, but settle in the United States rather than Canada. I know this was hard for her because they had been such a huge part of her life in her growing up years in Italy. But over the years she made sure to go back and forth between Ohio and New Jersey to visit them. She was still the proverbial "mother". Nonna also went back to Italy several times, one time specifically to be with her mother when her brother Fausto passed away. This would leave only her Mother and one brother, Nicolo Domenico, in Italy . I don't recall hearing from my family, that she ever returned to Italy again after that time.
But then life was busy in Canada, raising five children. Nonna, who became known as Jenny to her friends was a very strong individual. Her early years of working alongside her mother in Italy served her well and there wasn't much she was afraid to tackle as her young family was growing up. I'll never forget a time when she was about 80 or so. She had co-erced my then husband into fixing part of the fence and gate in her backyard. There she was while he was trying to remove the post; with both her hands clamped around the top tugging and pulling - and nothing could convince her to just relax and let the job be done as she had asked. Such was the way of Nonna. She was always on top of things and was what we fondly referred to as the "Godfather" of our little family.
I always remember my grandmother reading the newspaper, and she had a great love of watching TV and recognizing all of the movie stars. So it was a huge surprise to me when my aunt told me not long ago that Nonna would not have had an education in Italy and that in fact when she came to Canada she could neither read nor write. In effect she taught herself by looking through the newspaper and listening to the folks on TV. She never lost her Italian accent even though she emmigrated at the age of about 28 and lived through almost 70 years before she passed away. But her desire to learn and understand even the simplest things was always at the forefront and was sometimes quite amusing. She had a particular liking for Fess Parker. One night she and I were sitting in the living room watching either Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett; I can't remember which - but I will always recall this conversation. Leaning avidly toward the screen taking it all in, she turned to me and said "Come si chiame?" To which I replied Fess Parker. She looked questioningly at me and I said it again, to which she said something like "Feh Pahke". I again said very slowly "no Nonna - Fess Parker". I should have known of course that that's exactly what she said - and she was sure to quickly tell me "yeh - thats whadda I say". I never had a problem understanding anything nonna was saying to me but it seemed that my friends did. Whenever they would come to the house to see me, nonna being a very social person along with thinking she should be some sort of host, would invariably come and sit with us in the living room. And talk she would! With terrified expressions on their faces, my friends would concentrate on listening to her - desparately trying to understand her, until they decided that maybe they should just nod politely or maybe give a little laugh - all of this while trying to eat her biscoti and drink tea. Unfortunately sometimes their reaction was not appropriate for whatever it was that nonna was trying to tell them. Nonplussed, nonna would just grin back at them. But she liked all of my friends, and I can't remember any of them who didn't like her.
My mom and aunts always talked of nonna's dominance and I know that some things were hard for them to take. For instance boyfriends were always a source of discussion and sometimes the results were not always to their liking. Invariably she wanted them to stick it out with someone they really did not like; but even worse was when they wanted to marry someone whom she did not approve of. This was even true for their two brothers. But in the end, after a few spoiled attempts, they drew in their horns and married who they wanted to marry anyway. Of course her Catholic upbringing was very important to her and I am sure this held sway in any of the discusions of the appropriateness of potential spouses. That's why I find it so endearing when years later, after meeting my then future husband-to-be for the first time, she would ask my mother. He's a no Italiane??? To which my mother replied that he wasn't. Nonna thought about that for a bit and then thinking he might have one more saving grace she asked the inevitable - that being, was he a Catholic. When my mother replied that no he wasn't, it really didn't take her long to say "Oh well - he's a nice a boy anyway." And from that point on he became "Bigga Man".
I never learned to speak Italian, but it was not for my grandmother's lack of trying. When I visited her as a young child she would get me to say things like: Chuide a port (close the door) - or Chuide a fenestra (close the window) - or vuless nu becchere d'acqua. (I want a glass of water). I also learned some other Italian phrases but these were certainly not at her prompting! And when we weren't playing teacher and pupil; she would simply lift me up onto her lap, wrap her arms around me, and I would lay my head against her chest while she would rock me back and forth singing something that sounded to my five year old mind very much like "nina nana nu nu", giggling all the while. Unfortunately and to my deepest regret I never did learn the language but those intimate times with nonna remain in my memory. As did the times that I would spend overnight with her . What made it so special was that I got to actually sleep with her. Of course I would have to go to bed quite a bit earlier than she did. I would lay there in her double bed staring at the wall ahead of me which always held a photo of the Virgin Mary And I don't ever remember a time when a palm sheaf wasn't tucked into the frame - that vision being indelibly etched into my memory. I can recall being a little frightened because of course at that young age the house seemed huge with 4 bedrooms on the second floor surrounding a large centre hallway. So I always breathed a sigh of relief when nonna would finally join me, quietly slipping into her nightgown, laying down beside me and fingering her nightly rosary; or if I had managed to fall asleep before she came up - waking up to feel her next to me.
Prior to this time when we moved from Toronto to Hamilton, my family actually lived at nonna's house. In fact my sister Nanci was born while we lived there. I had my own bedroom on the same side of the hall as nonna and there was a cupboard door high up in the wall where my aunt stored hats and other accessories. This was another source of anxiety for me at nighttime as I would stare at that closet door waiting for someone to come out, until fatigue would take over and I would finally fall asleep. By day I loved to get a chair and climb into the closet and play around with whatever was in there, daylight holding none of the villains and ghosts of the night before. Outside my bedroom door was a closet that housed a laundry chute which went down 3 floors into the basement. My young cousins and I would love to play at being spies with that, one being stationed on the top floor, one on the main floor in the hall closet and one in the basement where the laundry ended up - passing notes back and forth. The basement was another thing altogether. She had a cold room down there with all kinds of preserves and canned goods stocked. And in typical Italian fashion there was a gas stove for any kind of frying and a large wood covered table for making homemade pasta - not to mess up the main kitchen upstairs. That house would always be nonna for me! In later years it was where everyone met to go off for the day to a picnic, or to the lake for a swim, or to just spend time with the entire family.
Of course we eventually moved out of nonna's house and we kids were busy doing what kids do. We became teenagers and began dating boys - and eventually got married. Nonna was there for all of this. And on the times that I did visit her - maybe on my own - maybe with my husband - she would say "you stay for dinner we go IGA and get chicken". And she would roast a delicious chicken dinner - after which we would play bingo. She loved to play games. But even more than that she loved to sit in her dining room and play her opera records. She would shut the two pocket doors, get out her albums, put them on the player, and sit there at the dining room table with her albumn covers in her hands -happily singing away. This is one of the things that defines nonna for me. And I have a memory that keeps popping up in my head and makes me smile and sometimes cry a little. There were several of us gathered at my Aunt Ida and Uncle Amy's place one night. I really can't recall what the occasion was but at one point we ended up sitting around and singing Italian songs. We started singing "We`Marie" when all of a sudden my grandmother's voice rang out loud and clear. As if on cue, all of us stopped singing and looked at her. She was in her own little world, sitting with her eyes closed and singing We`Marie for her all she was worth. I don't think there was a dry eye in the living room that night. To this day We`Marie is a song that I request whenever I am at an Italian venue - and I always think of my grandmother.
Nonna had a wonderful garden and it was filled with all kinds of interesting plants that I am sure she remembered from her youth in Italy. It was loaded with poppies. I understood why years later when I visited Italy for the first time and saw the fields of poppies growing everywhere . I don't think anyone could grow them like she did - at least I never seemed to get the knack. In the alleyway by the garrage was a parade of hollyhocks, and over the fence were loads of sweet peas. The rest of the garden contained all the normal varieties, delphiniums, snap draggons, salvia, phlox to name a few and of course the ever present Rugosa Roses. At the back of the garden and against the garage wall was her vegetable garden loaded with tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, zucchini - all mixed in with basilica and parsley to name a few. She had a great sense of humour about herself and so it was that one day she sat her chair a little too close to the edge of the garden. I looked on with horror as I saw her chair leaning precariously into the garden. There was nothing to do but watch as the chair tilted and she fell sideways into the garden. There she lay surrounded by all that glory, laughing her silly head off and we all laughed with her when we realized she was okay. It was another thing trying to pull her out!
If I said in another story that my father was the inspiration for all of my genealogy searches then for sure my nonna held one of the necessary tools that took me to the culmination of this search. Some years before I started this journey my cousin Ray had sat down with her, as he had done with his other grandmother and asked her to tell him who her parents and grandparents were. She did better than that. She was able to recite for him not only her grandparents names, but those of her great grandparents and her great great grandparents, on both sides of her family. I know now that such was the way of Roseto Valfortore. Everyone knew everyone else and they knew which family a person belonged to. It is so different than here in Canada where we remain rather anonymous. I wish she could see her little town now as I have been able to see it through the eyes of the internet and all of the sharing that other Rosetani descendants and I have been able to do. She would marvel at the fact that we can be in touch with each other so easily through the wonderful technology that we have today. I believe she would be very pleased. I also wish she could have known the wonderful man I met and married just four years after she passed away. I would have loved to hear her call him "Bigga Man". And she would be happy to know that although I never had children of my own, that I was fortunate enough to have two grandchildren. I think they all would have gotten a kick out of her.
I look through my family albums and I see photos of nonna, up north at the cottage being a good sport holding a string of huge fish that someone had caught. I see her - so proud with her first two grandchildren, Mary Ann and Louis; and later on by an old tree stump with my sister as an infant and with me posed next to her in some old clothing of hers that I had found in her attic. I see her at her children's weddings and I see her at her 85th birthday celebration all dressed up and looking as sharp as ever. But most of all I love and cherish all the old time photos of her and my grandfather that were taken in their early years before I was born - the years that I have tried so hard to learn about, because I never thought to question her history when she was still alive.
We as a family celebrated many milestones with nonna - her 80th, her 85th her 90th and her 95th. She was in fantastic health for all of them and still very sharp mentally. I don't recall her being ill a day in her life, never being in a hospital once. She had all her childen at home and she lived in that house almost right up to the end. In the last year of her life she was bedridden - just plain old tired out. When it could not be managed any longer - she was moved to a nursing home. She passed away one month later. My last memory of her is when I visited her a couple of nights before. She reached for my hand and I saw that she was so cold. I told her I would bring an extra blanket from home for her and I did the very next evening. The following morning she was gone. The nurses said she simply woke up, had breakfast, and went back to sleep. It was just as peaceful as that! She was in her 97th year and she'd had a good long life. She was the only grandparent I knew and I feel blessed to have had her for so long.
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Comment by Lynda Matthews on August 18, 2008 at 5:40am -
Thanks so much Phil. I am going to compile all of these into a book of sorts. I think my grandchildren, even though they are not blood of mine, will enjoy them. I remember at our Lanza family picnic a few years ago, we brought our grandchildren; I had brought along my binder with all of my family stuff I had done so far - and Tarra spent ages going through them in her own little world and I believe she truly enjoyed. As I said to Craig though, maybe now it's time for a little break - to stop writing blogs about folks who have passed - and for a change right a blog about the Italy trips. I believe I will take your advice though and break it down into parts. Thanks again for your encouragement.
Lynda
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Comment by Phil Falcone - Site Admin on August 18, 2008 at 5:32am - and to repeat myself, your stories just keep getting better and will someday make a great book,,, published or not. And people will be glad you told the tales long after you are gone. That's what immortality is truly about. When you share your knowledge with others, everyone benefits,,, and you live on. When you keep it locked away, afraid of revealing what you have,,, it dies with you.
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Comment by Lynda Matthews on August 17, 2008 at 6:06pm
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Thanks once more Dom and Aileen for taking the time to encourage me in this project. It is fun - and as you know from your children - when you write stuff like this you kind of take poetic liscence. We all know no one of us is perfect, but when someone is gone it is great to pick out those best memories we have of them. I was kidding with Craig tonight that maybe it's time I got away a little from writing about folks in my family who are gone - and maybe my next project will be about our travels in Italy. I think I could have fun with that. It's great that your kids have started at a young age to write about special moments with their grandparents. I Intend to keep all of these writings, at Phil's suggestions and maybe some day when I am gone my grandchildren will enjoy reading them.
Lynda
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Comment by Dominic and Aileen Goduto on August 17, 2008 at 5:31pm -
Hi Lynda,
Another beautiful piece about your family memories! As you know, we can relate to so many aspects of it with Dominic's mother and father having been born in Roseto. Dominic was born there as well but of course does not remember since he was 7 months old on leaving Roseto.
Our children can relate so many stories about "their nonna" and have done so through their school years. They have also written stories about their "bisnonna" and 'nonno" throughout their school years and particularly after their trips to Italy in their early years when they could really connect "what" was being told to them to what they experienced in Italy. This is an inspiration for us to dig out these earlier writings, put them in one place, and encourage them to write more. Like you, they also have so many more such warm and funny memories, some not so funny :-), of their grandparents and greatgrandparent and trips to Italy. They have put 'to words' early on so much that we just 'never got around to'.
Keep up the good writing!!!! It will be a great 'keepsake' for you!
Dominic and Aileen
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