Dear Editor, I read in the newspapers of the "White Christmas", implemented by the Mayor of Coccaglio, which is to identify, house by house, all the foreign people who do not comply and hunting, with a view Christmas. The news struck me, not just the idea of \u200b\u200bacceptance, citizenship and Christianity that underlies it, but also because it is the place Coccaglio resting place of my grandparents, and Mimi Caesar Comencini Hefti Comencini. For them I feel compelled to write this letter.
My grandmother, the daughter of a German-Swiss family, fell in love with Caesar and to marry my grandfather had to fight against all the prejudices that the Italians were victims in her country. The Swiss Germans did not like the Italians, they were considered dirty, primitive, they were afraid of, at most they used in their manufacture or to clean their homes. But my grandmother did not budge, he married his Caesar and came to live in Italy. My grandfather was of modest origins, but with many sacrifices he had managed to graduate in engineering. However, in Italy could not provide a sufficiently dignified life his wife and their two children were born in the meantime, my father, Luigi, and his brother Gianni. They lived in Salo, where business was very bad. One day my grandfather decided to immigrate to France, had heard that there is land bought at low prices, because the French left the countryside, and in each there was an Italian, two French. So they went away.
Their life in France was not easy, my grandparents, with little experience of farm work, had to learn everything. In his book, "Childhood, vocation and early experiences of a director," my father says: "Now it is difficult to imagine what our lives in the rural South-west France. We had no electricity, no running water. But we had the piano. Every night after dinner, my father sat in a chair, and, lulled by the music of my mother, slowly sinking into sleep. "At school, my father, who arrived in France when she was six, was always put yourself last counter, and regularly called "Macaroni", as in France were called the Italian immigrants. It was my grandfather Cesare to suffer most of all for the distance from Italy. My father recalls that he had built a crystal radio, which every night persisted in trying to run. When my grandfather became ill began to say "I do not want to die in France, I will not die in France." So my grandmother took him home, in Italy, his brother, in Coccaglio.
He was buried in the small cemetery Coccaglio, where many years later joined him my grandmother, who after his death had been living in Italy, in Milan. My grandparents knew what to leave their country to work, what they were strangers, they knew what to save the dignity for themselves and for their children. At the funeral of my grandmother I remember my father read the passage from the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus says "Love your neighbor as yourself." My grandmother was a believer in his own way, religion Valdese. I remember one day, a Friday, she had come to visit us in Rome for Easter, and I found her in her room, crying slowly, and when I asked her why she answered, drying quickly eyes with a handkerchief that he always kept in the sleeve of his sweater: "I think of Jesus, as he should feel alone and frightened in the Garden of Gethsemane." My grandparents buried in the cemetery of Coccaglio, which is not only home to those who temporarily administers the town in recent years, though it was theirs, and so now is a bit 'my and many others, who, like me, are descendants of those who had to leave Italy to work, with fatigue, pain, humiliation. And I'm sure my grandparents, if they could get up and arise from memory, condemn those who dared to invent the operation "White Christmas." On their behalf, through these lines, I do. (La Repubblica, November 19, 2009)
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