Anghiari si racconta

I was born in 1969, so this year I am 50, and that is something that gives me pause. My parents … I think of them often. My father was a person from humble origins, he started work in a bank at 17 years old, and 40 years later he was vice-director of the headquarters. It was a very significant career, because he was a guy with some kind of talent and…he was a people person – they used to send him when they opened a new agency. My mother was a housewife, but she had worked successfully as a secretary in an innovative company that produced autoclaves. With children, she decided to stay at home and be a mum. There were 3 of us, close together – I’m the oldest, then my brother, who is a year younger, and then my sister, who is four years younger than me.

Now, also the story of my family … there was this kind of a cloud because my mother had an older sister who had a serious disability, and in the ’50s she was put in an institution, because they couldn’t look after her at home, and in those days there was a stigma. This sister outlived my mother, she stayed for 70 years in the institution…it was a nice institution, it wasn’t an asylum. But this situation affected my mother profoundly, and from the age of 12 until a couple of years before her death, she went every Saturday to take care of her sister. I would go and visit too when I could.

My relationship with my father improved over the years. He could be severe – ‘No, you have to study…Why are you going?…’, but he was also affectionate. He decided to stay on in the bank until we all had jobs, even though in the last years it was a completely changed work environment – with privatisations and mergers, it was no longer a local bank providing a service to the community.

When he retired, he began doing voluntary work – he was the sort of person who has a sense of duty, he didn’t like to be lazy. In Pavia there is a very important hospital, and people come to it from all over Italy and abroad. Often relatives need accommodation, and patients too, when they have been discharged from hospital. These people were often exploited, so, during the jubilee, the Comune established a hostel and an association to host guests, and my father worked with them. My mother was worried because there were very young patients, and it was emotionally demanding. My father was very good with small children, because he was playful…. And I remember this young boy who recovered from leukaemia, then it came back, and he died. My father was devastated, because he’d spent a lot of time with the family and the child.

My father died in 2004, of lung cancer. He’d been a smoker since he was 12, but he’d quit 10 years before. He was diagnosed with this cancer and after 4 months he was gone. For us, it was a very demanding time. We were able to bring him home, he died at home, with all his family and things around him. I was really, really moved by the outpouring of grief from people. I remember one of his colleagues burst into tears, and another one said to me, ‘your father for me was a teacher, an example’. There was a very full church.

My mother suffered from a serious form of hepatitis C, which she’d had since 1984, and she required difficult treatments from time to time. She would recover and then go down again. But, she was a very strong woman, and wished to be completely autonomous. Yes, she too died at home. She died in 2015, at the age of 75. I was actually living with her for the last year of her life, because I had found a job in Milan. I was by then married to Elisa and living in Anghiari, so I lived in Pavia with my mother during the week and commuted. All that travelling was difficult, but, in the end, the most important thing was that I was staying with my mother during that time.  When she died it was kind of surprising, even though we were prepared because she had a serious illness, but you keep thinking … she is doing ok. Probably she helped me more then I helped her – she liked to care for me when I got there.

Going back to my childhood. I did my primary school with the sisters, the Salesiani, which has been very important for me. It was an economic sacrifice for my parents, but it was in the ’70s, a period of unrest in Italy, and they wanted a sheltered environment for me. The Salesiani were very modern in their education … even though they were catholic, they weren’t narrow minded. It was an open education, with lots of opportunities and different activities… they showed films, before anyone else in Italy. The most important thing in the school was that I met Andrea, who is still my best friend. And I am still in contact with my teacher, suor Diana. She has retired in Novara.

The passage to public school in junior high was quite difficult, because there were bullies, I didn’t really fit in well, I was kind of socially awkward. Then I went to Liceo classico, where the main subjects are Greek, Latin, a classical education. I was an able student but not always diligent… . In the end I did quite well. A defining experience at the time was the Scouts. I entered as a cub and then I stayed until I was 19. (My brother stayed till after he was 30 as Group Leader.) I developed friendships that have lasted to this day, and it gave me a sense of duty, an understanding of the importance of helping people.

Another passion I had when I was young was rugby. I started playing at 16, I quit around 30. Even though it gave me confidence and friendship, there were other things that were not so positive … I spent all my time with the rugby team …. Probably a common thing in my life is that I have a strong passion for a long time and then at a certain point I feel that it isn’t the right thing anymore and I leave. And then I was in Amnesty International – that was very important to me, for many years.

I did law, at Pavia University – it’s included in the Coimbra group, the group of the 50 oldest universities in Europe. I chose law because I thought of becoming a magistrate. Probably it wasn’t the right path for me – the Italian way of studying law is extremely theoretical, they train you to be a university law professor; you don’t learn what a lawyer or a judge does.

I practised law for a year. Then I had another focal point: I did a training course on European law, financed by the region, and started working in a private/public company that helped small businesses. In connection with this work, I started studying English (and did a working placement in Manchester), and then it became a passion of mine, it opened a world to me. I continued working in the same field for more than 10 years, mostly with BIC, (Business Innovation Centre), a European network supporting the local development of businesses with the assistance of European funding. One project involved connecting artisans to prepare them to present their services to big industries – a consulting job that obtained some good results and was appreciated by the regions involved.

I had a house in Pavia where I was living by myself. Work was going well, I had some important projects; there was Amnesty; a little bit of the rugby; I did some travel in America, South Africa, Zambia. But, at this time I was kind of not really satisfied with my personal life. I had very good friends but not steady relationships.  I took up photography which became another passion, with quite good results, and sometimes I sold some pictures. But I was in this kind of limbo – I tried meditation, yoga, I was interested in something spiritual and thought about returning to the church.

And then there was this very traumatic event, which had a deep impact on me. This was in 2008. I had a very serious car accident, in which I broke my pelvis badly, and developed an embolism. I was in the hospital for a long time. It was a very stupid accident, it was 2 o’clock in the morning, and I just missed the on-coming car. There was a very big outpouring of support for me, a lot of people came to visit me, and my brother and my best friend Andrea, who is a doctor, organised for me to go to the best place possible. It took 6 months of rehabilitation, but it brought a big change in me. I became calmer, more serene, confident that I could cope with difficult situations – maybe I was stronger than I had thought. And, I was confident that I was appreciated, loved: I was moved by how many people called and said ‘I’m praying for you’. But the most important part of this experience was Elisa…

I had already met Elisa a couple of years before, because she was friends with a woman I knew working in a European project on fair and sustainable economies. Elisa came with her friend to the general assembly of the association in Milan. I really liked her, but she wasn’t so interested in me! We talked from time to time and we met when she visited her friend.

After the accident, I contacted her and we reconnected. She really saw something different in me, that I was calmer. (Distraction is my most important fault, and Elisa, who is incredibly bright about people, could see that in me. She knows me very well!) And so we started to chat on the phone, and then I came down to Anghiari. I remember, it was the 1st May 2009, I remember Anghiari with all the shops. I briefly met her parents and other members of her family. So we hooked up, but it took a long time; she didn’t want a formal fiancé, she was cautious…for months she introduced me to people as ‘my friend Daniele’. Anyway, she came quite soon to Pavia and met my mother.

There was one particularly important thing that we considered as a kind of sign – it brought us together. Before I had the accident I had spent some days taking photographs at a community called Nocetum, run by nuns on the outskirts of Milan. It is a spiritual group, with a small church; they turned an abandoned farm into centre for women and children that need refuge. They are very nice people and do fantastic things. I stayed in touch with them after I had recovered. After the accident I was still thinking about the faith, my doubt and the wish to reconnect with it and I spoke with this nun, Gloria, and she suggested a book with a deep reflection about faith. It was Martin Buber, The Way of Man; She suggested it because it wasn’t a proselyting kind of book (Buber is Jewish), but a mature book. A few weeks afterwards, when I visited Elisa for the second time in Anghiari, she said ‘I have a small gift for you, it is a book I found very important… it has been suggested to me by my friend fr. Tommaso, a priest whom I met in Africa’.  It was the same book that Gloria had suggested to me. I was very moved and considered it sign – it’s not as if Martin Buber is a household name. It was a natural progression from there.

I moved to Arezzo, where Elisa was staying at the time – she was working in the family shop (Busatti) there and doing a degree in agronomy in Florence. I went back to Pavia for a week every month to work with the BIC, and in Arezzo I was working on another project with a cooperative. After a year, I moved to Anghiari because Elisa had graduated and started working for an agricultural machinery company near Anghiari.

We didn’t live together until after we were married in 2013. Then we lived in an apartment in the old part of town, where I’d been living, and stayed there for 5 years. A year ago we moved in with Elisa’s parents, in the country at Carmine [4 kms out of Anghiari]. They have another house in Florence and spend half their time there.

We were married in the church of Carmine – it was very beautiful. We decided to have common songs. There were going to be a lot of children at the wedding because a lot of our friends had married younger. So, my brother-in-law, who is a teacher and sings in a church in Milan, prepared a choir of children to sing the most common church songs. There were 180 people. It was wonderful that mother was able to come … it was quite complicated because at the time she was in hospital a lot, and needing intravenous antibiotics. My brother and my friend, Andrea, helped a lot with the process of getting her to the wedding. I was also happy because my uncle (my father’s brother) and aunt came and enjoyed it so much. We had the reception in the cloister. We didn’t have much money but people helped a lot. For the buffet, we bought most of the stuff locally, from friends. It was very simple but we had a lot of help from Silvia, Grazia from the shop …. In the end, people were happy.

I would say I have a bittersweet relationship with Anghiari. On the one hand it is a really special place. I like the people, the sense of humour, the idea of community, and I like this medieval past. But there is this kind of parochial view. In Milan, if I did something stupid, I could move away; here you have to be careful, everyone knows everything. I think I could live here very happily, but I probably couldn’t be a true Anghiarese – I lack the DNA of the village people.

When I started living in Anghiari, I was doing the same sort of consulting work I’d done before. The year’s contract in Milan was with a French NGO that specialised in supporting disadvantaged people in opening a new business. Then Giovanni, Elisa’s cousin, gave me the opportunity to move into the work I’m now doing. Giovanni is the most generous person, I am so grateful to him. He was running the Palaia [a group of holiday houses just outside the town], and handed this over to me to manage. And then when another guy decided to retire, he contacted Giovanni who put him in contact with me. I now manage most of the properties that he had managed.

I find this work satisfying. Previously, I had always worked on projects in a cerebral way, which sometimes felt meaningless. With this work, I get a sense of accomplishment, and that makes me happy. For example, at the peak of the season, I might help with cleaning the houses, everybody is involved. ‘OK, I’ll clean the oven’ – then that’s something accomplished. There are far more pluses than minuses with this job: I have a circle of trusted people working with me, I meet people that are different, I learn things that are interesting. I like organising things, and, mostly, people are really satisfied with what we do. It suits me because I like welcoming people. And, I have important responsibilities, because I have the keys to 14 houses.

I’ve just started a small project of visits to a local winery. I think I started in the right way, because it didn’t begin with some kind of theoretical proposal. I began sending guests to have a wine tasting, then I went along a couple of times, and I realized that there was a problem because the most interesting part is the personal history – he’s a very interesting guy, but his English is limited. So, I suggested that we could do this thing together, ‘I can send you people, I can come along and translate’. The first one is tonight.

I almost can’t believe that I live here. I always thought I would live in Pavia, maybe in Milan. Anghiari is a place with a very high quality of life, the people are friendly, you can really feel part of the community. There is a passion, a sense of history and culture. It’s a place where extraordinary things happen. You can meet interesting people, you can meet actors – I saw Claudia Cardinale here. There is a very lively life.

I only get back to Pavia to see my brother and sister at Christmas. Now, with the houses, it is almost impossible to get away – that is the downside of my job. On the other hand I feel proud being able to explain things about Anghiari to people. I think that, having come from the outside, I notice things that the people here might take for granted. Ancient rituals, like the procession on Good Friday, which, I think, is quite extraordinary.

Before I came to Anghiari, Elisa had said ‘It is very beautiful’. The first time I came, I arrived from Sansepolcro, and it really looked amazing – the mediaeval walls rising above the valley. I had the feeling of living in a kind of Tuscan dream.

Now Elisa and I are taking a big step because we are asking the bank for a loan to renovate the house we share with her parents. We have decided that it will be our main house – it’s quite a big important decision. How we came to it? Well, one of the conditions of our relationship was that we would stay here, in Anghiari, in the area, because Elisa has very strong connections here and really wouldn’t have considered moving to the north. Then, we decided we had to move from the apartment we were renting in the old part of town. We liked it very much, but there were structural problems that were going to require major renovations. So, we decided it would be better to invest in something that would be our own…. And now… we have had a lot of discussions with Elisa’s parents – obviously this is a complex situation and renovations will be a disruption for everyone. But we hope that the outcome will be better for us all living in the same place.

I really like living in Anghiari. I like the people. I have made friends, especially with Elisa’s friends and her cousins, but also I have real friends amongst the owners and guests of the places I manage. And I feel welcomed here.