My Grandmother's Apron | Memories Woven in Love

 

In the story of fatigue, love and hope among the first Italian I

mmigrants of Rio Grande do Sul

My Grandmother’s Apron

My grandmother always wore the apron. It was not only to keep her dress from getting dirty. Anyone who thinks that has never known the life of the first settlers. An apron, in the days of the colony, was worth more than many expensive things, because it did everything and accompanied the woman from the crowing of the rooster until the fire in the hearth went out. It was always in front of her chest, worn by sweat, by the sun, by the rain and by the years, yet every mend told a story that no one ever wrote down.

When our old people set foot on this land of dense bush, they did not find ready fields, vineyards, stables or vegetable gardens. There were only big trees, thorns, stones and hard work. The axe rang from morning until evening and every trunk that fell seemed to say that hope still had the strength to walk. But while the man was clearing the bush, the woman kept the family standing. And the apron was always there, like a companion that never complained.

With the hard work the sweat ran down even over the eyes, and the apron served to wipe the face. When homesickness for Italy squeezed the heart, that same apron dried tears that no one was meant to see. There was no shame in crying, but our old people had little time for it. The work always demanded more than the body could give.

How many times I saw the old women gather up apples, pears, potatoes, beans and ears of corn in the corners of the apron, turning that cloth into an improvised bag. How many times I saw it hold two warm eggs, a few pieces of bread or a handful of nuts to take to the children. And how many other times it served to grasp the handle of the pot, to lift the polenta cauldron from the fire or to move a saucepan without burning the hands. There was nothing that could not be done with a well-tied apron.

But the greatest task of that apron was not to carry things. It was to carry love. It covered the child who had caught a chill, cleaned his hands dirty with earth, stopped the blood from some scrape and, afterwards, with a caress, made the crying pass as well. If the mother had little to put on the table, the apron could not make more bread appear, but it could hold together the dignity of a family that asked nothing of anyone.

The women of the colony left no books, made no speeches and not even their names remained written on the stones. Their memory stayed inside the houses, in the smell of the bread, in the polenta that boiled slowly and in the mends of an apron worn by years of hard work. They built towns without drawing attention to themselves, they raised the children, they kept the faith alive and they learned to smile even when the heart felt like crying.

Today, when I look at an old apron hanging behind a kitchen door, I do not see only a piece of cloth. I seem to see my grandmother’s hands still moving, I smell the wood fire, the bread just out of the oven and the polenta steaming on the table. I seem to hear the silence of those distant years, when a family’s wealth was not measured by money, but by the strength to keep going even after a day that seemed never to end. Perhaps history remembers the men who opened roads, felled the bush and raised the first houses. I, instead, believe that without the apron of our grandmothers not one of those undertakings would have been possible. Because so many times it is the simplest things that, without making noise, hold the world up.

Author’s Note

I wanted to write this chronicle because, so many times, the true story is not in the great deeds that everyone remembers, but in the little things that time has almost made us forget. A woman’s apron for many people seems only a piece of cloth, but for me it is a document of flesh and hard work, able to tell the life of the first immigrants better than many photographs or many books. The families who cleared the bush and made our towns be born left few written things, but they left signs that even today can be read with the heart. An apron worn by work speaks of poverty, of courage, of faith, of a mother’s love and of that silent sacrifice that kept whole generations standing. If we do not gather these memories today, tomorrow nothing will remain but names and dates, while the true soul of the colony risks being lost forever. This chronicle is a work of imagination, but its essence comes from the memory of many Italian families who made the apron an inseparable companion of every day. If, after reading it, someone remembers grandmother’s apron, the smell of the hearth or an old family photograph, then this piece of memory will have found its place and its meaning.

Dr. Luiz Carlos B. Piazzetta

The Surname That the Scribe Invented | Italian Immigration

 

Italian immigrant family arriving in Brazil with historical documents showing surname changes during immigration.

The Surname That the Scribe Invented How Thousands of Italian Families Saw Their Identity Transformed in Brazil

No one imagines that an entire family can change its name without ever having made that decision. Yet that is exactly what happened to thousands of Italian immigrants who arrived in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century. Not because they wished to abandon their identity, nor because the authorities had established a new way of calling them, but because, at some point along the long journey between the small Italian village and the new life in the Brazilian colonies, a scribe wrote down what his ears had understood. And the ink of that pen became stronger than memory.

A surname has always been far more than a collection of letters. It carried with it the history of a family, the memory of a grandfather, the reputation built over centuries, the bond with a small community in the Veneto, Friuli, Trentino, Lombardy or Piedmont. In many cases it was enough to pronounce it for everyone to know from which valley, which mountain or which parish someone had come. It was a true map of a person’s origin.

When those men and women left Italy, they took very little with them. A few clothes, a handful of tools, a rosary, photographs, letters from relatives and a hope larger than all their luggage. They also took their surnames, believing they would remain the same on the other side of the ocean. They did not imagine that the Brazilian forest would be less capable of transforming them than the writing of official documents.

There is a rather widespread idea that surnames were altered as soon as the immigrants disembarked in Brazilian ports. History, however, shows a different reality. The landing registers, passenger lists and various documents of the period demonstrate that, in most cases, the names arrived in Brazil in practically the same form in which they had been written in Europe. The transformations would take place later, slowly, over the years.

It was in the churches, in the civil registry offices, in the deeds of land purchase and sale, in the marriage registers, in the baptisms of children, in the inventories and in the naturalization processes that many surnames began to change. The priest asked. The scribe wrote. The settler answered in his dialect. Between a word spoken and another recorded there existed an invisible abyss.

It must be remembered that a large part of those immigrants did not even speak official Italian. Italy had been unified only a few decades earlier and every region retained its own way of speaking. Venetian, Friulian, Trentino, Bergamasque and many other dialects were the languages of the family, of work and of faith. Many settlers had never learned the Italian taught in schools. They spoke exactly as their parents and grandparents had always spoken.

On the other side of the table sat a Brazilian scribe who had never heard those sounds. He tried to reproduce on paper what seemed closest to the pronunciation. There was no intention of modifying anyone’s identity. There was only the sincere attempt to record a foreign name using the knowledge at his disposal.

It was thus that some letters disappeared. Others appeared unexpectedly. Double consonants became single. Vowels exchanged places. A surname ending in “tti” began to end in “ti”. A “zz” lost one of its strokes. In certain families, brothers registered in different towns ended up receiving distinct spellings for the same surname. Everyone believed they were right.

The apparently insignificant detail ended up acquiring the force of law. The official document was reproduced in all subsequent registers. Marriage confirmed the altered surname. The birth of children repeated the new spelling. The inventory consolidated what had begun as a simple error of interpretation. Little by little, the family ceased to exist documentarily under the name it had had in Italy and came to exist officially under another.

The most curious fact is that many of those immigrants never noticed the change. They were honest workers, far more accustomed to cultivating the land than to reading documents. Several signed only with a cross, placing full trust in the authority of the priest or the scribe. If the paper said that was their surname, then so it must be. After all, there were far more urgent things to face: clearing the forest, building a house, planting maize, protecting the children and surviving the first winter.

The years passed. Grandchildren arrived, then great-grandchildren and, finally, fourth-generation descendants. The modified surname became part of the family’s identity. No one any longer imagined that, in a small Italian community, a different spelling existed waiting to be rediscovered.

Today, when descendants begin their genealogical research, they often find themselves facing this same enigma. They search for a surname in the Italian archives and find nothing. They consult passenger lists, civil registers, parish books and censuses without any result. Only after comparing ancient Brazilian documents, forgotten signatures, baptismal registers and land title deeds do they manage to understand that the surname they were seeking never existed in that form in Italy. The scribe, without knowing it, had created a new documentary identity.

Curiously, this does not diminish the family’s history. On the contrary. It adds another chapter to it. The Brazilian surname too has become true, because it has come to represent the life built in this land, the work performed in the colonies, the houses erected with their own hands, the churches built through mutual help, the children raised among vine pergolas and pine woods. It has ceased to be merely an orthographic alteration and has become part of the memory of immigration.

Perhaps that is why so many descendants are moved when they finally discover the original spelling used by their ancestors. They do not feel they have found a new name. They feel they have recovered an ancient voice. For the first time they manage to hear, through the correct letters, the pronunciation that once resonated in the narrow streets of a small Italian village more than one hundred and fifty years ago.

No scribe intended to erase a history. No immigrant desired to lose his origins. What existed was the encounter between two languages, two worlds and two different ways of understanding writing. From that encounter were born thousands of Brazilian surnames that preserve, even when transformed, the courage of those men and women who exchanged poverty for hope.

In the end, one understands that a surname can change its letters without losing its soul. Because the true inheritance was never solely in the form in which a word was written. It remained in the calloused hands that opened clearings, in the women who taught the first prayers to their children, in the families that preserved faith, work and honour. The letters may have been invented by a scribe, but the history they represent continues to be, integrally, the history of the Italian immigrants who helped to build Brazil.

Author’s Note

For a long time, the alteration of Italian immigrants’ surnames was regarded merely as a historical curiosity. Yet it is enough to follow the trajectory of a single family to understand that those few modified letters produced consequences that spanned entire generations.

A surname does not identify only a person. It links children to parents, grandchildren to grandparents and descendants to a community that often has existed for centuries. When this documentary bond is altered, even by a simple writing mistake, part of that path becomes harder to reconstruct. Thousands of descendants of Italians have discovered this when they began their genealogical research and realised that the name inherited by the family simply did not exist in the registers of Italy. What seemed a dead end was, in reality, the result of a transformation that had occurred many years earlier in a civil registry office or in a parish book.

It was this human dimension that awakened my interest in the subject. More than telling the story of a surname, I sought to reflect on the value of identity and of memory. Every altered letter represents the encounter between two cultures, two languages and two worlds that had to learn to live together. In the majority of cases there was no intention of erasing origins, yet the documentary consequences of that process still challenge historians, genealogists and thousands of families seeking to rediscover their roots.

This chronicle is a work of a literary character, constructed from historical facts widely documented concerning Italian immigration to Brazil. The characters and narrative situations are fictitious, but the phenomenon described occurred with countless families and continues to be confirmed by civil registers, parish books, passenger lists and genealogical research carried out both in Brazil and in Italy.

If, at the end of this reading, some descendant feels the desire to open an old certificate, to speak with grandparents or to seek out the small community from which his or her ancestors departed, then this text will have achieved its true purpose. Because recovering the spelling of a surname is far more than correcting a document. It is restoring a link of memory that time has tried to hide, recalling that the true inheritance of the immigrants was never solely in the letters of a name, but in the courage, the work and the hope that they bequeathed to future generations.

Dr. Luiz Carlos B. Piazzetta