Auguri Mamma !

Today would have been my mother’s 99th birthday, and I am having a nostalgic time reviewing all of the celebrations enjoyed over the years in various places in Italy.

As my mother’s birthday fell right in midsummer, there was always some delightful location to select for a celebration.  Our family albums are tucked away in Rome and I am traveling, so I must conjure those destinations from the attic of my memory. Many recollections come easily : a lunch time picnic among the olive trees between Fiesole and Maiano, when she turned 50, and I presented her with a print of Venice that I had saved up for months to buy; an evening picnic in a field near Lucignano, a medieval Tuscan town my mother loved because the unbroken wall circle was shaped like an artichoke; the Altipiani di Arcinazzo to escape fierce heat in Rome, and when I made a nectarine cake that we gobbled up, just the two of us, celebrating in the cool, poppy-dotted plateau.

She would be so pleased to share this blog, on her birthday, with her brother and sister.  My aunt, the last of the three Osborne siblings, died this month, leaving me the repository of so many family stories of what it was to grow up in Rome in the 1920s and ’30s, and then to rediscover that same Italy in the 1940s, finding old friends who knew you still from when you were little.

My mother taught me to travel.  “It is all a question of being curious, and knowing how to look and how to listen”, she once told me.

Traveling with my mother and her brother and sister, as I did from my earliest babyhood, was what planted the seed that would become Insider’s Italy.  My earliest memories of being with the three of them was picking blackberries after going to visit the sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia and the Nile Mosaic at the Palestrina Museum : this was the first time I had ever seen a hippopotamus, and it was a large thighed, magnificent example executed in tiny tiles on an ancient Roman floor.

My uncle’s Italian was good, because as an M.I.T. physicist he returned many times to Italy and presented talks in Italian; his Italian was however best at a restaurant table. He adored the art of the Italian meal, most of all speaking with waiters, organizing dishes and selecting wines.  His favorite foods were ossobuco and vitello tonnato and I with all my might tried to overcome my early childhood tendency towards vegetarianism so I could order the same dishes as did he.

My Aunt Chrissy loved food, and art, and gardens and wines.  But really she loved all things Italian. As the smallest of the siblings, she was the only one who, when they left Rome when fascism made life ugly for Americans, had still not adeptly mastered how to twirl spaghetti with a fork.

She shared Mummy’s deep interest in Renaissance painting. My earliest clear childhood memory of Chrissy was watching her, as I sat on a museum bench in Siena, as she looked intensely at a painting and then stepped away saying with such enthusiasm “isn’t that beautiful ?”  Two decades later, she and I together developed a serious interest in Italian wines; when we travelled together it was with identical wine tasting diaries and the small but encyclopedic Burton Anderson Guide to Italian Wines with we annotated enthusiastically. We always saw eye to eye.

This evening as I raise my glass to my mother, and her siblings, all Rome born, I feel so fortunate to have this photograph of the three Osborne children in the early summer of 1928, sailing for the first time to the United States from Rome.

They refused to speak English, but only Italian.  Here they are shown on the Conte Biancamano ocean liner with their mother and their nanny Lisetta; no sooner did they arrive in New York, Lisetta jumped ship, never to be seen again. Who knows what happened to Lisetta ?

Auguri Mamma !