“My mother Giorgina is there until I am three, then our care is entrusted entirely to the so-called ‘young ladies’, of whom I have good memories. I love many of them very much, the affection they show us is matched by that of Grandma Marianne, who treats me as her favourite, and Aunt Lu.” (p. 115). Like Albiate, from very early childhood the family villa in Forte dei Marmi is one of the places where we all grew up together. Violetta and I and Aunt Lu’s daughters, Benedetta and Elisabetta, were somewhat ‘interchangeable children’; this is well attested to by some of the many pictures in my family albums, in which my aunt holds my sister Violetta and me by the hand and smilingly takes us into the water, or pushes a dinghy with me and my cousin Benedetta, her eldest daughter; in the last photograph, a couple of years later, Violetta and I – whose hair was a beautiful red – are with Mama.
Aunt Lu, however, also left early, and at the height of a storm. In the 1980 memoir written by Guido and Claudio Caprotti against their older brother, it is recounted that the break, both personal and definitive, between Bernardo and Guido began after their uncle’s separation from his wife in 1973. “Bernardo pretends (…), to manage the painful marital separation planned by Guido with sensitivity and wisdom, with consequences that would be most damaging to Guido’s daughters (Benedetta and Elisabetta), at a tender age. He demands that they abandon their mother, that is, their home in Milan, their world, and that their already disrupted lives be even more disrupted. It is at this point that Guido ‘exasperated by such cruelty and incomprehension’ demands (…) ‘the alienation of all his company holdings’. The siblings, and this is well imprinted in the memories of us kids, will find a temporary compromise: Benedetta and Elisabetta will remain on the third floor of Via del Lauro but their mother will only be allowed access to the flat if she does not pass through the courtyard. Bernardo, therefore, acts as supreme judge and bans Aunt Lu: she will take the house on the neighbouring house number and will be able to see her daughters by passing through a door that connects the two flats on the third floor.” (p. 109).
Aunt Lu came from a family of great doctors. With our families – Venosta and The Caprotti family – the Austoni had always known each other, from the dance school with Uncle Claudio to the carnival parties when they were kids; I keep in my archive photographs of a smiling blond Lu looking at the brunette Giorgina Giorgina at a party at Venosta’s house in 1954, while they are dancing with two equally young cavaliers. After separating from her uncle Guido, Lu remarried Mauro Olgiati, who also worked with my sister Violetta and me on graphic projects for Esselunga private label products. The aunt died in February 2022.
