Miguel Bornaschella - The satisfaction of having achieved my aims

“Between Nápoles and Rome, Between the Adriatico and the Mediterranean”, this is the way I locate Montaquila in the world and in Italy.

Bornaschella’s Family Tree, from my grandparents to my siblings and me.

The town had been built around the mountain, it is assumed to defend the inhabitants from invaders in remotes times.

My mother worked as much as my father did. Very early in the morning she milked the cow and later prepared the curd and the cheese. Here I can be seen: the smallest of all, next to my Mum and my siblings.

Another ordinary task was going to the fountain carrying a copper vat and walking three hundred meters to collect water. The positive point was to integrate social links.

The vat used by my mother to collect water from the town fountain.

The mill used to press the grapes and the olives, later the wine and the oil were processed.

Mill used to press the grapes to elaborate the wine. This one was built by my “great-grandfather”, Pasquale, around the year 1900.

By 1945 the advance of the American army determined the beginning of the end of the war.

After the withdrawal of the American army it was common to find unexploded devices dropped everywhere, soldier’s clothes, blankets and even parts of their jeeps and lorries.

One of the tributes to fallen soldiers after the Second World War.

Between happiness and sadness, the fact of surviving the economic situation became more and more difficult. In our family, though, we had … let’s say, an unthinkable oasis, a touch of good luck which with very small things, bringing it up from our memories some years later, provoked us say the phrase: “This changed our life”.

Once the Second World War had finished and after having migrated to the United States, Maria came back to the town. She was a woman with whom we had complex and far degrees of relationship. On this occasion a friend of hers called Amelia came with her. Amelia also had relatives of the same kind of relationship with some people in the town. They had not been in the town too long when Amelia had signs of an allergic reaction which caused skin irritation. She had been contaminated either by the water or by any meal or perhaps God had wanted her to be joined to our lives definitely. It was then when the doctor who assisted her, prescribed as a medicine to heal her pain and injuries, some baths with water with sulfate coming from a spring. My father, who by those days worked for the trapiche (mill) of the family where these two ladies were lodged, covered 6.21 miles to fetch the medicinal water in wooden barrels, every single day during Amelia’s stay. He used to leave early in the morning, brought and left the barrels in the house where Amelia lived. He was punctual and rigorous, every day, until after a month when Amelia had been properly cured. The woman was also punctually grateful. She paid him for his service. This gesture was very well received and thanked accordingly, but besides she told him before leaving Italy to go back to the U.S.A.: “Giovanni, thank you so much! Meanwhile I am alive, your family will not lack for anything”. And this was like this. From her departure, and until she died, every month, with the same rigorous seriousness that my father had had, Amelia sent us a package with clothes for the whole family. Things that we could not have had, and we went on receiving this package even after my father had migrated to Argentina.

Still, the economic situation was worse. By the year 1949, I was one year old and my father had a new hope when he was contacted by the owner of an important piece of land which runs by the riverbank of the Volturno River in the Porcino Valley. That person wanted to contract my father as a foreman in charge of a group of people who would work in his field. The project was gradually taking shape and my father’s dream and illusion, too. But fate, Divine Providence or fatality that always pulls the strings as they please, twenty days before the planned date to start work, decided that Mr. Nicodemo died and with his death, also the project, the land management and the buildings died. Hence those pieces of land are up to now frozen in time. They remain in the same state, but in complete abandonment and neglect. For my father this was the final blow. In the middle of such external, internal, economic shocks, he took the decision it was the right time to migrate. The conversation about migration arrived home one day. The truth was that several relatives, friends and neighbours had already lived this situation. We knew about their experiences and results, but finally we were now, and specially my father, in the middle of the scene. As it can be imagined, there already was a human mechanism, a kind of manager in this country, who with different skills and honesty, administered the journeys and arrivals of the emigrants in their intended destination. Different countries, among them Argentina, facilitated the immigration and it was common to hear comments of the advantages and disadvantages in living in this or another more remote place in the world and start a new life with their lives, hearts and families, as a whole or separated…