Running away to find out about my family (Part 2)
We arrived in Vienna, Austria at 6 am on a Monday. Standing inside the elegant medieval inspired hotel, I can only describe my look justifiably by saying “I just flew 27 hours from Australia”. At some point in the flight, I went from ‘preppy 18-year-old’ to ‘disgruntled mother of eight.’
The worst part is, I'm now forced to compare myself to stylish European locals. It’s like comparing a Mercedes to an old run down Toyota your Grandfather's friend (Gary) had sitting in the street because, “It’s still a good car”.
As soon as we recovered, we went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where a relative of mine had some of his paintings displayed. If I am correct, the painter Titian, also known as Tiziano Vecellia was a very distant Uncle of mine. Titian was born in a little town in the north of Italy called Pieve di Cadore, scrunched up in the mountains near the Austrian border. He came to Austria to paint for notables of the Austrian court, hence why there were so many of his paintings in Vienna.
From Austria, my father’s hometown was only a short drive past the Italian border. Auronzo di Cadore is a little town nestled just before the Dolomites. Surrounded by mountains and wildflowers, it's just a short walk from the lake where my family's apartment sits. A block recognisable from its light yellow exterior with bright blue shutters, it was passed down from generation to generation, and played a pivotal role in my childhood. It reminds me of times
where my father and I would play by the lake while he would show me different types of wildflowers. My father was always intrigued by nature. I imagine he got that from Titian, I hope we all did.
My Aunt, Maria, a small Italian woman with short blonde hair and a laugh that encapsulates pure joy, shouts down from her window, “Venetia, is that you?”. For a moment it’s as if I'm caught in a scene from Romeo and Juliet. That is until you remember that instead of Juliet, it’s my 85-year-old Aunt. And in the role of Romeo, it’s just a bunch of overheated, slightly discombobulated Australians stumbling out of a car.
She lives in one of the family apartments, a little one on the second to last floor, filled to the brim with family photos. As a child, I was creatively inspired by her cat feeding contraption. As she lived three storey's up, and imaginably it was a lot of effort to go up and down the stairs to feed the local cats. So, she decided to tie a string to a basket and feed the cats that way. When I was younger, I tried to recreate it at home. Unfortunately, the space which separated my bedroom window and the roof was about the height of me, and I also had no cats. It was more or less just me putting a basket on the roof, waiting a for a few seconds, then bringing it up again. As I’ve gotten older, the cat feeding contraption has gotten a lot more serious. It’s now a heavy duty, electrically powered cat feeder.
She calls down to us, telling us to put our luggage on the hook at the end of the wire. As I am quite fond of my belongings, I politely decline. However, my best friend Grace agrees after my aunt convinces her that it's a great idea.
Before I know it, we’re in her tiny kitchen. Filled with lasagna, bread, and photos of the past Popes, she makes some Italian coffee. To me, this is summer. Birds sing as the breeze pulls the cool, fresh air into the small apartment, the coffee pot gurgling in the background. “Do you want cream in your coffee? Your father always put cream in everything he could,” she tells me. I filled the rest of the tiny red and white cup with cream and realise why I am always a little overweight. I am my father’s daughter.
“Here, this is your father.” She pulls out the dusty photo album, showing me a picture of a baby no older than two. “We left Italy during the war” she says, while moving the cream closer to my side of the table. “My father couldn’t find work in this town, so he went to Australia. My mother and I left to Australia a little later, that’s where your father was born”.
In October of 1936, a little boy was born in Brisbane. I imagine the Australian nurses must have been overwhelmed, as every Italian in Brisbane came to welcome Astro Elvio Vecellio into the world.
"My mother died after she gave birth to our baby brother,” she tells me, scrambling to pick out the biscuit that dropped into her coffee. “After my mother died, my father put us in an orphanage in Brisbane, your father, the baby and I,” she gets frustrated and picks out her biscuit with her fingers.
“I was so hungry all the time, there wasn’t enough food there. There were so many children, you know? There was a pineapple farm next to the orphanage; we ate so many pineapples, I was so sick of those damn pineapples.” She finally gets the biscuit out, a moment too late as it falls apart in coffee.
“I was so hungry sometimes I would eat the skin off the mandarins.”
Unfortunately, her baby brother passed away in the orphanage at nine months old, she tells me. She goes on, telling me how my father was moved away from her, to their father’s new wife.
“I was in a boarding school by the beach, and your father was in another one, but I had to move far away because of the war.”
She tells me how they travelled back to Italy by boat, showing me photos of a young man with rolled up sleeves and pants on the deck.
“Your father would sleep in the boats because he was always a silly man, he got sunstroke and was always sick. I was never sick, I was so fat. They were always feeding me gelato because everyone else was seasick,” she says, showing me a photo of a plump young woman with a smile bigger than life itself.
As I drink my coffee, she tells me more about their time in Australia. How she and my father would work on her father's tobacco farm in the holidays. “All the other children’s parents owned fruit markets, mine owned a tobacco farm.” she laughs, and the whole room brightens. She tells me about her father's three wives, how the second wife died months after they got married. Telling me about the last wife, Rosetta, she laughs and jokes about how she was the only one to outlive her father. The third wife, Rosetta, was older when she had her son, Lorenzo. “After having the baby, she got very sick. She was quite old, and she was in the hospital for a while. So I had to look after the baby like he was my own.”
She talks about how she worked while raising her brother and how she and my father were always working, no matter which country they were in. How he worked his way up in the world to become the man I knew. He moved back and forth, and then to a caravan park in Sydney where he built his business and slept in a place smaller than our bathroom. She talks about her memories of him meeting my mother, then buying a house in the country where his heart felt at home. My father was a hardworking man, I always knew him to be. He treated everyone equally and always told me to be kind to everyone. Just as he gave my mouse Cupcake a chance to see Bondi Beach on early Sunday mornings, he gave all he could to everyone else in his life.
I sometimes suppose it’s easy to be consumed in the happenings of the world. To be swept up by the current affairs, celebrities, and breaking news stories. Trying to fill your brain to the brim with new information along the way. Unfortunately, sometimes I think we all get too swept up, and it's easy to ignore your own world. The world you were born in, raised in and live in. My father once told me everyone has a story. Even if I am late to the party, at least I finally know his.
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