I have an unresolved thing with Argentina, where both my parents lived in childhood and adolescence. I went there three times and fell in love with it, both Buenos Aires and the rest of the country. I would move there in a flash, though it would likely be a bad idea, and Tania doesn’t share my enthusiasm.
My mother spent her last years living with us in Athens. When she died, all her stuff stayed with us. My elder daughter, Adela, wanted her grandmother’s books. While helping sort them, I found this document among my mother’s papers, together with many identity documents dating back nearly 100 years. This has caused a flare-up of my Argentinian fever.
First impression: tickets, passports and identity cards have gone downhill. Passports used to be beautiful, hard-bound, sometimes with holes in the front cover to reveal writing behind them, and were full of important signatures and stamps. Identity cards used to be little precious things covered in soft leather and embossed with gold lettering. My current passport is a Mickey Mouse substitute in comparison, though allegedly more secure, blah blah blah.
A bit of background on this momentous ocean-liner ticket. First, I tried to figure out how much it cost. There is a discrepancy I can’t make out. I cannot make certain sense of the inscription on the right that says importo del biglietto 3710, with a big 7, though in today’s money those 3,710 Italian lire would be approximately £3,700. The stamp below the names, however, indicates 75 lire per day per person, about £300 for four people in today’s money. It seems reasonable, considering the Garibaldi was not shabby. The crossing took something like 15 days, which meant my grandfather took his family across for roughly £5,000. I don’t know which of these figures is correct, but both seem cheap.
As I mentioned in the note, my grandfather blew all the money—intended to settle his family permanently in Argentina—in the ship’s casino. This was not the first chunk of money he had lost. He was in his thirties by then and had been gambling his mother’s fortune since adolescence. I say his mother, because his father was notably illiquid. The Mandellis were a classic late 19th-century well-to-do family. His father, Count Pietro, came from a distinguished Milan patrician family established in the 1100s (though they claimed late 900s), which had married well and accrued possessions all over Italy, notably in Piacenza and neighboring Caorso.
Pietro had married Deborah Maldifassi, a rich heiress of a converted Jewish family. This was a classic combination at the time: landed gentry marrying money and switching their income from land rents to an industrial economy. They lived in a palatial home in via Morone in Milan. Apparently a young priest on the staff ate with them and said prayers. He also did the shopping. There was a fourth place set at the table “for the poor.” Empty, I assume. Count Pietro was a dandy and lived large. He kept selling bits of land to finance his lifestyle and apparently ran out. However, when he broke the news to his wife, she explained that she had been buying the plots of land through intermediaries all along.
Their only son, my grandfather Gaetano, was born in 1890. He developed Type 1 diabetes in childhood and was given only a decade or so to live. He was sent to a boarding school on the Borromean Island in Lago Maggiore, where he was so desperately unhappy that he escaped and walked home to Milan from Stresa, which Google Maps tells me would take 20 hours. He was his mother’s darling, and she indulged him in everything. He developed a gambling habit that was so worrying that they sent him away to London to study and stay with his uncle Daniele Maldifassi. Daniele turned out to be a gambler too, and the two apparently falsified Gaetano’s school attendance records to fool the rest of family.
By the early twenties, my grandfather had blown a literal fortune on gambling. He married an Argentinian woman, Margherita Colombo, whom he had met during a stay in Buenos Aires, had two children, and tried to settle in Italy. His gambling habit eventually became unsustainable even for his mother, so the family ordered him to start a new life in Argentina. They gave him one last big purse, handed to his wife, not him, with instructions not to give it to him under any circumstances. She was a smart, capable and strong-willed woman. Nevertheless, his charisma and pester power must have been impressive, because she handed over the cash midway. He immediately blew it. They arrived “una mano davanti, una dietro,” as they say in Italy, literally “one hand in front, one in back,” stripped completely by poverty, though I assume my grandmother’s extended family, all affluent doctors and lawyers, must have given them a hand.
to be continued
Wow! What a story of adventure & passion!
Marvelous story!