Nonna Teresa loved me dearly and I went out of my way to respect her without any prompting from anyone except that Dad did encourage me to go visit her at Senigallia one summer and this I did so it became a yearly summer practice for me after that.
As it is with mothers, Nonna Teresa, was devoted to serving her two sons and she did the best she knew how to care and instruct them. In spite of some of Dad’s struggles to obey her during his earlier years she did have a close relationship with him.
When Dad returned home after the end of the hostilities of WWII he promised to stay close to his mother and take care of her and this he did up to the day she died.
However, if Dad had not met Mom he would have continued living with Grandmother indefinitely. It was the arrival of my future Mom that changed the playing field and this was hard for grandmother since she was no longer prima donna in Dad’s life.
Had it not been how gracious Mom was with Grandmother I would never have been able to be as close as I came to be with her. Dad was always amazed how well Mom handled his mother and even the respect Mother garnered from her. Mom’s love for Dad and grandmother and her diplomatic skills was the glue that allowed our family to stay close and for me to have a great relationship with Nonna Teresa.
But it was no walk in the park for Mom during the first years. One of the toughest of several tests Mom had to pass with Grandmother after Mom married Dad and that she failed at for several years – was the “fruit price test”.
When Mom began inviting Grandmother over to our Rome apartment during the middle 1950’s the two of them would sit for about an hour or so on a comfortable beige couch in our elegant living room chatting on different subjects. But grandmother soon found mother’s Achilles’ heel. And so without fail during the course of the subsequent conversations grandmother would then bring up the subject of how much she had paid to purchase oranges, apples or some other fruit. She would then turn to Mom and ask her: “How much do you pay for that fruit?” For the longest time Mom was unable to even match the exceptionally low prices that grandmother was paying for fruit at the market places near to where she was living. This was because Grandmother lived in a different part of Rome where the price of fruit at the open market place was always lower than everywhere else. The local peddlers that came in had virtually no overhead and they were paid in cash and so they evaded all taxes and the volume of business in the heart of historic Rome in those times was high.
On several occasions Dad complained to Mom that his mother was able to negotiate much better with Italians. He felt that his American wife was being taken advantage of by the shrewd Roman peddlers near where we lived.
Severely handicapped because we lived in the part of Rome where everything was more expensive and on top of things Mom had a foreign accent that made her more vulnerable to being taken advantage of. With these insurmountable obstacles it was an unending lose-lose situation.
So Mom took special lessons on how to speak correctly in Italian. Although her accent improved and so did her use of Italian verbs, still she could never negotiate the prices that grandmother was able to. At one point I don’t know if there was even talk of having my grandmother purchase the fruit for Mom.
But Mom never gave up.
On top of everything, Mom had a Jewish father and her father had owned a grocery store in Chicago! But being in the right, and maybe because she was part Jewish, something happened: God came to Mom’s aid.
One day while walking not too far from our apartment a new grocery store opened near the only other established brick and mortar one. An aggressive territorial competition began between the two stores. All of sudden grandmother was coming over and asking Mom the usually questions and the impossible took place: Mom had bought her fruit at a better price than Grandmother! This happened once, then twice and finally on a regular basis until grandmother admitted defeat to my father. The competition was over and Mom was no longer questioned about her ability to purchase fruit and Dad could not find any fault with the way Mom spent her money on groceries.
Mom had not just rivaled grandmother, but actually won the price war for fruit!
Soon after meeting Maurizia in August of 1970 I brought her over to meet Nonna Teresa while she was vacationing in Senigallia in order to get her counsel and approval regarding my girlfriend. I think that at first Grandmother was a little possessive – just as she had also been with my Dad many years earlier. But soon after meeting Maurizia and my speaking to her I remember how grandmother too became very much accepting of Maurizia and she saw how Maurizia was going to be a wonderful future wife for me. Both were from Bologna, both could knit and Maurizia was very sweet to her. My grandmother did not live for very much time after she had met Maurizia so they were together on only a few occasions. Had she continued living they would have remained the greatest of friends – just like it was always was with Mom.