My trip to Italy, part 1 - London to Costageminiana....

To say my trip to Italy was wonderful is an understatement, it was everything I hoped it would be and so much more......it was never going to be just a holiday because it was a "going home" of sorts - a big trip for both my husband and for myself and the children. I took many many photos and saw so much - it was amazing. I can honestly say I felt an instant connection with the area and I can't wait to return.

Even the flight from London to Parma felt different - we knew at least four other sets of people on the plane, one of them was even at our wedding.....people seemed somehow friendlier and there was that sense of people heading "home".

This was an Italy a million miles away from fashionable Milan and the people watching piazze of Rome....this was Emilia-Romagna, home of fabulous food, good people, people with simple values and kind hearts.

The drive from Parma to Costa took around 90 minutes....90 minutes of the most windy, twisty-turny roads I have ever been on - if they ever decide to change the Tour de France to Italy, I have the perfect route for them. The views however were spectacular.....enormous hills, beautiful old houses, huge expanses of sky and so green....that was a surprise to me, I was expecting it to be dry and a little dusty.

Many people moved from this area of Italy, mainly for employment reasons, to Wales and I have heard many times over the years it was because the landscape of Wales resembled that of Italy.

Taken from Giovanni's old home, this view shows where we stayed - the top house in middle of the photo on the left with the red roof - a huge house but look how tiny it looks next to the mountains....

Costageminiana was beautiful, I loved it and immediately felt at home there.....I am fascinated by history, particularly family history, so I was in heaven exploring the old houses and barns.....churches and cemetaries.

The view from the "Antoniazzi" family cemetary....

Our surname is Antoniazzi and everywhere we went I kept seeing the name...Giovanni, my father in law, was born in Costa, he was the eldest of four children and I knew that his parents came from there too. I was stunned to find out that there have ALWAYS been Antoniazzis in Costa since at least 1502......over five hundred years...isn't that incredible!! At one stage there would literally have been one family and then gradually they would have married people from other villages and Costa expanded. I hesitate to call it a village since it is simply a cluster of very old houses, many of which are uninhabited....the nearest shops are 15 minutes away.......it was so much smaller than I expected.

The view from our breakfast table.....the local church is the white tower on the hillside oppposite....

We visited the local cemetary - a beautiful space set high on a hillside with, again, breathtaking views.....I would say that half the people buried there are Antoniazzis.....with the other half having surnames that we know from friends in London......there was a strange but comforting familiarity about it all.

The house that Giovanni grew up in is still there, owned still by our family but no longer lived in - built from beautiful old stone, it is surrounded by outbuildings and barns and we could see the old bread oven outside and even the rusty old tractor that my husband used to ride on when he was small.

The old tractor.....and my son probably trying to figure out a plan to get it working!

From my brother in law's enormous apartment where we stayed, we could see across to the church where Giovanni would have attended mass and the school he would have attended.....there was only one road anywhere and it was just wonderful driving along the roads that we knew he would have walked along through all weathers.

The view that my father in law grew up with.....taken from outside his home....

Giovanni's family had a farm and later on ran the local osteria or restaurant so food would have been pretty plentiful although he was born in 1929 and during the war years this was an area occupied by the Germans (more of that later).

The family barn.....Giovanni hid up here for a very long time trying to avoid a hiding after the chicken-selling incident!

Another outbuilding - this also housed the bread oven.....I love the construction of these old buildings....

The house where Giovanni was born....initially they lived in the part just above the yellow door on the left but when they started the osteria, they moved into some of the central building....

The tower of their local church....

Luisa's home is the grey part of this building , it would have been stone but has since been rendered, the lower part of the building (the brown door) would have in fact been where they kept animals so the family lived in the rooms at the top of the building....

My mother in law Luisa on the other hand had a much tougher poorer upbringing. She lived in Magnani about 30 minutes drive from Costa and if I thought Costa was isolated, it has nothing on Magnani. As we approached her old home, we had to go up a dirt track and then we had to get out and walk. Magnani is a collection of 4 or 5 houses and hers was a curious L-shape, pretty small for a family of 5.

The approach to her home.....and the grey building on the left is the side part of her home....

My husband says that Luisa didn't talk as much about her childhood, not as much as Giovanni did....and I have to say that whereas Giovanni could talk about Italy all day long, Luisa was much more reticent......to me, she was always Italian but there was a sense of her keeping certain things at a distance. She was the eldest of 3 children and her father died when she was 14.....it must have been incredibly hard for her mother to look after 3 young children on next to nothing, even with family help (cousins lived next door).

As I have mentioned before, Luisa left Italy at a fairly young age to come and work in London.....seeing her childhood home only made me wonder even more though how she managed to leave, the pressure on her must have been immense to stay home and help her mother and I am sure she must have struggled with the decision to leave. She came to London not speaking one word of English.....she became an au pair with a lovely and well off family in London's Hampstead and learned to speak English as she looked after the two young boys in her care. She did tell me once that she was determined to move away and learn to speak English......she sent money home to her family but settled in London and never lived in Italy again.

The tower of Luisa's local church....

I was really struck by the number of war memorials we saw.....I don't think I knew that this area had been in fact occupied by the Germans during the Second World War. One of my husband's uncles was in the Resistance (the underground army who fought against the Germans) and both my in laws would have seen the Germans frequently. The villagers heard that the German soldiers were on the look out for teenage girls and seeing them actually approaching their home one day, Luisa and her friend ran into their barn and covered themselves in cow dung, mud and anything else smelly they could find.....it worked, the Germans thought they were "dirty country girls" and let them be.....how frightening is that. Giovanni on the other hand had a slightly different experience.....he got the hiding of his life when his mother found out he had been selling her chickens to the local German soldiers.....he was one mischievous boy!!

The war memorial at Luisa's church.....I was really struck by this as it had the most beautiful sepia pictures on it of the men who died....

My father in law, Giovanni Antoniazzi

My mother in law, Luisa Paganuzzi

I can't tell you what it meant to me to see the houses and the areas that my in laws came from, it was incredibly emotional and at times my heart literally ached knowing they are no longer with us ....I could hear Giovanni's voice in my head constantly and I could visualise them in Costa and Magnani easily.....at times it was hard to imagine them EVER wanting to leave such beauty and such peace, particularly Giovanni.......but we all have dreams and needs and are curious and eventually their destiny was clearly to meet in London and start a new life and a new family here. I have many questions I would love to ask them but sadly that is not to be. I know that they would have been thrilled to know we have visited, particularly our children.

Clearly I am not the world's best photographer but I hope I have captured some of the beauty of the area we visited.



Next.....part 2 - Costageminiana via the Appenine Mountains to Florence and Pisa!