My family
Italy
19 December 1922
My family consists of three people: my mother, my grandmother, and me.
My mother is twenty-eight years old, she is short, she is almond-eyed, she has a small mouth as a crescent moon, and she has a roseate and plum face, like me, and thick brown hair.
How much she works for me! She gets up early, she turns on the stove, she prepares some coffee and milk, so when I get up, it’s all ready.
My grandmother is a small, nimble old lady, and she has an always-smiling, chubby, little face. Since she doesn’t speak good Italian, sometimes she makes some blunders, so we laugh and have a lot of fun.
I can’t tell much about my father because he died when I was three years old. I remember that, while I slept, he put some sugared almonds under my pillow, then he made me believe that the Befana [in Italian folklore, an old woman who delivers gifts to children throughout Italy on Epiphany Eve] had brought them to me.