GRANDPA MARIO'S HOUSE

During my early childhood, my father was unemployed and my mother had to work and take care of two small children (my sister hadn't been born yet) and during this period my brother and I, refractory to any attempt to place us in nursery school, often spent entire days at my paternal grandfather's house.

My grandfather Mario lived with his grandmother Jolanda and my aunt Liliana, who suffered from polio and cognitive delay, in a council house in a peripheral district of the town in Oltrepò where I was born many years ago; it was a very modest apartment located in an even more modest building without a lift or heating, still with the stoves and the coal-fired kitchen and certain dark cellars smelling of saltpetre, overflowing with anthracite, demijohns of red wine and rickety bicycles.

If many things were missing from my grandfather's house, there were, however, a radio and a record player, and even another 45 rpm record player for aunt Liliana, as my grandfather did not want his catafalque to be used for records by Gianni Morandi, Fausto Leali and Caterina Caselli that my aunt somehow managed to sneak into the house, each time arousing the good-natured disapproval of my grandfather.

Because for my grandfather, a former tenor of the local choir, music was limited to Verdi, Puccini (in any case subordinate to Verdi) with at most a concession to a few songs sung by his absolute idol, Claudio Villa.

At my grandfather's house I heard Nabucco, Aida, opera arias and romances for the first time...things that in my house, where there were only a few dozen jazz and rock'n'roll records from the 50s, there was not even a shadow of.

My grandfather's records were venerable, hard, heavy and fragile Bakelite records, some still at 78 rpm, which carried with them an unmistakable smell of dust, nostalgia and yellowed paper...my grandfather rarely listened to them as if they were mystical talismans, and he often made me and my brother beg him: "Grandpa, put on the triumphal march! Grandpa, la gelida manina!"...but in the end, moved by the coaxing of his grandchildren, he ended up giving in and extracting the precious relics from the rustling tissue paper.

I remember him as if it were today, sitting on his beloved deck chair, humming the salient passages of his favorite arias with his querulous, but always in tune, senile voice...then his hands devastated by the lathe transformed themselves into doves flying in the rarefied sky of nineteenth-century melodrama.

It didn't seem strange to me, then, how my grandfather, a retired worker who barely spoke Italian, would competently discuss Caruso and Di Stefano, Del Monaco and Corelli, always concluding: “In any case, there is no one like Beniamino Gigli, nor will there ever be”!

Then my father found a new job, and with the first pennies, classical music records began to arrive (the first, I'm sure, was Beethoven's Eroica), I began my first piano lessons, and then jazz, rock, the first successes as a musician...but I still sometimes find myself saying to myself: "Grandpa, put on the triumphal march! Grandpa, la gelida manina!"