The Story of a Samurai Chess Set. Part 5. La Casa Colonica

Our "Casa Colonica", in Falcone, Frascati, Rome

From yesterday: At some stage there will be more about the Chess Set. Promise. It's just that for me, wandering down this alleyway of memories is just unavoidable. I'm there. It's 70 years ago. They were the Sweet Times. Though the wine was Dry. 

There is it, above. I found it. Our place, we lived in from 1954 to 1958. 

ADDED: As soon as we'd arrived in Rome, we were put into the Hotel Imperiale, on Via Veneto, built in 1895 and still going strong today 130 years later. Not suitable for our family, says Mutti today, so we moved... to... 

A "Casa Colonica", a Farmer's House, just south of Rome, in the district of Frascati, in the village of Falcone, where we grew -- and where they still grow, as they have since Roman times -- the Cesare Red Wine grapes. 

I'm supposed to be talking about the Samurai Chess Set. Though I seem still to be sidetracked. And will be again. It's not a Zugzwang. Oh no. It's just a side-track. 

The place above is where we lived, our little family, Pa, Mutti, Anne and me, for five full  years, 1953 to 1958. 

This is a Casa Colonica, or Farmer's designs found in the Agro Romano south of Frascati. Built for small land-owning or tenant-farming families. 

We, the Australian government on behalf of our Diplomat Dad, rented it from the owners, that happened to include a "nice Australian lady" as Mutti calls her, married to a local Italian farmer. It was the only place our Third Secretary Father in the Embassy could afford, as digs in the Via Veneto were out of reach even then.

ADDED: Mutti says the "nice Australian lady" was "Frau Tosolini", though I suspect she means "Signora". I find no Tosolinis in the region, just in NE Italy and one now in Melbourne, Australia, who, you never know, might be a relative of those Tosolinis in Frascati. After all, she was an Aussie.... 

These Case Coloniche were pretty much standard in the Castelli Romani  countryside after the 1951–53 land-reform parcels were distributed. 

What I remember: above there's the Olive tree, smack bang in the middle and a lovely shade tree for us in the summer. It was old even then. 

To the left of it, round the side of the house, was the Pollaio or chicken coop. An early and for me unforgottable memory is of our Mutti, having chopped the head off a chicken, watching it as it ran around, on the remains of its nerves, headless, till it collapsed. And her then calmly and casually picking it up, walking inside to hand it to our daily help, La Domestica...

La domestica of course, was called Maria, as it turns out nearly all were in those days. 
In every Casa Colonica, every kitchen, every vineyard row in the Castelli Romani in the 1950s, there was a Maria. She was the one who stirred the polenta, plucked the chicken, knew exactly how much wood made the fire just right. She was part of the house, not just in it.
And now, seventy years later, I say her name, and she steps right back into the room.
And she would call me. "Pietro, vieni qua". 
Pietro, vieni qua. I hear it. Even if I can’t smell the warm cotton, the faint soap, the steam rising off the pasta water, or feel the soft folds of her dress against a small boy’s cheek, I feel the weight of the memory. That moment: her hands busy at the sink or stove, voice low and kind, pulling me in like I belonged right there, safe in the heart of the house. Maria wasn’t just the maid....

She was the quiet keeper of the kitchen, the one who made the world steady while everything else (new country, new language, new life) spun around us.\

 

And me, little Pietro, tucked into her side, breathing in the smell of bread, garlic, woodsmoke, and her, that was home. 

Seventy years later, and her voice still calls me back. 

I stand in the doorway of that memory, my Italian childhood memories.

Yet I still haven't got to the Samurai Chess Set.... It did happen, though: that Pa and I lay on the ground, in our little Soggiorno the family living room just inside the ground floor entrance of the Casa Colonica we see above, in winter warmed by the cast-iron Fornello, burning old olive wood. 

Making moves. Sideways still, for now.