The curvy roads get tangled through the mountains like a snake wrapping on its prey, as the sun mellows the
breezes that come from the 8 winds.
It takes three hours to get there from Florence, a two hour drive through the coast of Tuscany and a one hour
ferry from the port of Piombino, a city famous for its steel factories. The ferry starts its journey through a
landscape of cranes and fumes. As the cars approach the port to cross the sea, people can stop by Vito’s, a
bakery that sells pizza al taglio, for a quick lunch.
The ferries are huge metal monsters, some still decorated with their silly 90’s designs. There’s a Batman one, a Looney Toons one, a few with marine landscapes. They have silly names like Moby Baby and Moby Love. As the ferries cross the sea, a flock of seagulls always makes sure to keep them company. They fly so close to the old metal bodies that the travelers can almost touch them. As the seagulls go back and forth on that same journey, the metal monsters connect the coast with the island, a place where time slows down. Elba is home to 7 little counties, a constellation of tiny cities placed on top of mountains or by the sea. Their narrow roads house around 30.000 people, Nonna Fiorenza is one of them. She just turned 94 and is in great physical shape. She lives in Elba with her sister, Zia Grazia, who’s 6 years younger, and her sister’s husband, Zio Marcello. They are too old to live independently, so they’re being taken care of by Grazia and Marcello’s son, Marco, and his wife, Radka. They all moved there in 2020, to isolate themselves from the Covid outbreak.
Nonna Fiorenza and Zia Grazia have always been very close. They are two little Italian ladies, one with dyed blonde hair and the other with dyed bright red hair. They love playing cards, eating dessert and drinking wine. They are always tanned, even in the winter, so much that when they smile, the wrinkles in their face open up to reveal streaks of lighter skin. Marcello is a bald man with metal framed glasses. He spends most of his time sitting on a wheelchair, his right arm dangling to the side. With a cane in his hand, he’s able to walk a few steps, moving from the wheelchair to the couch or the white plastic chairs that sit in the outside patio under the purple bougainvillea flowers and the shadow of a big secular pine tree.
I.
When he was 52, Marcello had a stroke that caused him to lose partial movement on the left side of his body and
gave him a severe speech impediment. As he stumbles through the few sounds he can pronounce, it’s usually hard
to fully understand what he’s trying to say. And with a light sigh of frustration, he just gives up, sitting on
his wheelchair or stumbling away with his cane and swearing “diobono”—“good god”, one of the few words he can
pronounce. There are only a few other sentences that he’s able to fully enunciate: everytime there’s a family
meal, he tells all the young cousins the words “pippi e mani”––“pee and hands”, a simple way to tell them to go
relieve themselves and wash up before sitting at the table, for it is impolite to leave the table during the
meal. As the cousins have grown into teenagers and adults, that sentence has become a running joke between them,
but like a swiss watch, Marcello never forgets to state it every time they all eat together.
For the longest time, the kids didn’t truly understand the extent of what Zio Marcello could comprehend. They weren’t aware of the fact that he was just trapped into that condition, fully aware of all of his surroundings. Zia Grazia once mentioned that he tried to end his life twice, first by rolling his wheelchair down a staircase at the hospital, and then again when his son found him attempting to walk into a river. Before the stroke, Marcello had many friends, he loved fishing, playing pool, and spending time with his kids. He was a healthy and loving man who worked at Poste Italiane and drove a bus that took kids to school. He’s been living with that condition for over 30 years. Unable to fully walk, unable to fully communicate. Zia Grazia took care of him for all those years.
II.
Zia Grazia and Zio Marcello lived together in a little apartment in Via palazzo dei Diavoli, in the outskirts of
Florence. She was a force of nature, always so positive, enthusiastic, funny, smart. She would talk about her
life, and his life, and their life together. As opposed to Nonna, she had worked her whole life. She was a
socialist, a feminist. She had stories about her strikes at work, about how she hid her first pregnancy until
she got promoted. She was a lab assistant for a cosmetics brand, and even though she only had her elementary
school diploma, her lab manager would ask her for advice when needing to talk to the supervisors.
In January 2020, when she still lived independently, she came to see me at my house. I was visiting from the US, getting ready to hop on a plane that would take me back to school. That was the last time we had a proper conversation. She told me about her honeymoon, about her life with Marcello. I had the idea of making a documentary about them. I told myself “next time I see her, I’ll have to record her.” Unfortunately, a year later, she fell and hit her head on the ground after fainting due to low oxygen caused by contracting Covid. She was never the same after that. Now she tends to always repeat the same sentences over and over, words that echo in her mind like ghosts of thoughts she used to have, but with the same love, passion, and witty humor that has always been.
“Il giardiniere ci ruba la frutta”—“The gardener keeps stealing our fruit”
“Ho visto un leprotto l’altro giorno! Se si mette uno spillino in una cerbottana, si prende e si fa arrosto”—“I saw a hare the other day! If we put a pin in a peashooter, then we can catch it and roast it.”
“La Fiorenza è così stonata che quando canta si mette a piovere”—“Fiorenza is so tone deaf that when she sings the rain comes down”
“La prossima volta ti vengo a trovare in America”—“Next time I’m gonna come visit you in America”
Last summer, she told my aunt that she came to visit me in America. She took a plane and I picked her up at the airport. I was so nice and welcoming, I even introduced her to my friends. She finally got to live it, something she had so much wished for became a reality, at least in her head.
Now she spends her days playing cards and chit-chatting with Nonna. They sit together, finding every possible place to lay their card deck: on their bed, on one of the white plastic chairs lying outside, at the dining table. They play briscola, scopa, bazzica, but the older they get, the more mistakes they make, the more cards they lose, and the more they complain about each other’s gameplay.
III.
Nonna Fiorenza used to live with Nonno Giampiero in Via Mario Pratesi, a little road on the east side of Florence, outside the historic city center. A week before their anniversary, in 2005, Nonno got sick and had to be sent to the hospital. They had a short cruise planned to celebrate their anniversary. During his convalescence, she packed their suitcases, waiting for him to come back home and hop on the ferry together. But the suitcase never ended up leaving Via Mario Pratesi; he died on the day of their anniversary.
Before moving to Elba, Nonna Fiorenza lived with us for over a decade. When Nonno passed away, she and my great grandmother, Nonnina, who lived up to 104, moved to our apartment in the city center. Nonnina was Nonno's mum. They shared a room at first, then once Nonnina passed away in 2010, Nonna started sharing a room with Tommaso, her youngest grandkid. She would sleep in the bottom of a metal light blue bunk-bed, right below him. Everyone always wondered how he could sleep with her, as her snores were so loud you could hear them from the living room. He once said that one time he woke up in the middle of the night and thought there was a boar in the room. Nonna Fiorenza was a great grandmother, she raised all of her grandkids, holding so much pride in having 5 of them, but especially raised little Tommaso, who was a pretty unexpected addition to the family. They were inseparable.
Now Nonna shares a room with Zia Grazia. They sleep on twin beds next to each other. The older she gets, the less she mentions her grandkids names when she sees them. Their names are now blended with others. Tommaso is now Giuseppe or Giampiero. Alice, Camilla e Irene are now Silvia or Anna. Nonna doesn’t talk as much anymore, and when she does, she announces each syllable at a cranked volume. She used to have a hearing aid, but apparently her children decided that they didn’t want to spend any more money on it, so they got rid of it. Her lack of hearing justifies her lack of speaking, and maybe that’s the reason she doesn’t remember her grandkids’ names.
When we were kids, we often visited the beach. On our last day, when hopping onto the ferry that would take us back to the mainland, she would stand with us on the outside balcony so we could say goodbye to the summer. Every year she’d sing us the same song –
Whenever I go to Elba to visit them, I think of that nostalgic tune, trying to hold onto every single crumb of their memories, of their past selves; the echoes of their words that often rumble in my head. Hoping that when I see them again, I will get even just a glimpse of what they used to be. Hoping that somehow those same words still rumble in their heads too. But as their memories are fading away, so is their hearing, their words. The dye on their hair is also slowly growing out, and the fragments of life that they share, slowly blend with their imagination, with their dreams. And as they’re still here with me, I collect these moments and keep them treasured in my head, hoping that I will still be able to recollect them in the future. Or maybe memories are just like seagulls, destined to escape to the island one day, to be set free onto a slower and quieter place. And maybe their memories are just like that, on the verge of flying away and finding a safe and cozy place to rest. And that place might simply be the minds of all of the people who still think of them. How they are and how they used to be.
Irene Piazza
Irene Piazza is an Italian multimedia artist, designer, and visual storyteller based in Richmond, VA, and Florence, Italy. Her artistic practice ranges from graphic design & motion graphics to video, sound production, and mixed-media installations. Irene’s work investigates feminist and political themes, addressing gender-based violence and safe access to abortion. Irene has an obsession with pink, dogs, and dismantling the patriarchy.