Growing up in Italy during the 1950’s was an inimitable experience.
In about 1954 my Dad bought an older villa in Fregene. It had a large terrace on the top with several 50 caliber bullet holes in the metal railing around its edges.
From there my brother and I shot many rubber bullets at everything that flew over the top. The last shot fired however was from my sling shot. After I hit a pigeon and stunned it slightly I never felt I should shoot again. I felt so bad that I had hurt the poor little bird.
When I was about six years old I had a conversation with a manual laborer that was working in the garden of our villa. He wore a sleeveless undershirt and while working for us he was always singing.
I asked him why he was so happy and his reply that morning was that he had eaten half a panino with a single pass of butter on it together with one anchovy and maybe would be able to do so again that evening and that he was so glad that the war was over. It was 1955.
That was all that made the worker with the sleeveless undershirt so very happy.
He was proud to have a unique status symbol of an Italian worker – a new sleeveless undershirt all of his own. Owning an undershirt gave him a great feeling of self-worth. If defined where he was economically in life. He had something of his own that was new and that he had purchased with the money he had earned.
After the end of the Second World War everyone in Italy was very thankful and grateful and no one had to be told what to do.
Everyone was happy and content.
Matter of fact the joy throughout Italy was so great that wherever you went along the public streets you could hear working men whistling or singing. The people that worked with their hands were often the ones that demonstrated the greatest joy.
All rejoiced that the war was now over with and everywhere there was a great surge of confidence and hope.
It was the beginning of a new life for Italians and they were all filled with overwhelming enthusiasm. No more trouble and danger. No more gloom or doom. No more fear.
The happiness of Italians came not so much from what they now had, for they still had very little, but from their new found freedom and gratitude to God that they were no longer facing destruction and deprivation. Hunger and death no longer stared them in the face.
Everyone knew very well that God was to be thanked for their new found condition in life.
Anxiety and uncertainty were replaced with great economic opportunity. The sun was rising once again on Italy and everyone could feel its warmth.
That was the Italy that I grew up in.